Peter Craven
The Best Australian Stories 2001
Black Inc., $24.95pb, 385pp, 1 86395 083 4

ONE OF THE more imaginative publishing ideas of the last few years has been Morry Schwartz's annual Best Australian Stories, Best Australian Essays and the Quarterly Essay, each edited by Peter Craven. The books have been selling well, by all reports, at least partly because they get themselves talked about and signal essential reading.

The Best Australian Stories 2001 is no exception. Its fat good looks — acid yellow cover, layout, title — promise much. The mix of authors over 380 pages does, too. It opens with Tom Keneally and Amy Witting, ends with Kim Mahood, and in between are stories by many familiar names, plus a few people I hadn't read before.

In a substantial and provocative Introduction to the first volume, Best Australian Stories 1999, Craven qualified his selection: 'It represents no more than the best bits of imaginative story-telling I could find in a given stretch of time.' Fair enough. This year, there is only a passing reference to methodology. Craven includes 'stories in the traditional (that is, self-contained) sense as well as extracts from work-in-progress'. But the cover blurb, which he would have okayed with his publisher, surely, tells us that this 'is a collection of the best stories that have been produced by Australian writers during the last year … it shows the best fiction makers we have at the top of their form'.

The trouble is that this collection shows us no such thing. It certainly reveals that there have been several superb stories published in the last year or so: Kate Grenville's 'Bushfire' and 'Mate' (from the Bulletin and Granta), Tim Winton's 'Aquifer' (Granta), Murray Bail's 'Camouflage' (published by Text), Gerald Murnane's 'As It Were a Letter' (Southerly), Liam Davison's 'Motel Morning-Star' (UQP) and Gillian Mears's 'La Moustiquaire' (Southerly). Each is shapely, fully formed, doing something that hasn't been done before. It certainly shows that there are some good things coming up this year: James Bradley's novel The Resurrectionist and Hannie Rayson's new play 'Inheritance' among them. And the lovely, tough fragment from 'Isobel, Anna and Stan', the first part of a novel left unfinished by Amy Witting, who died in September 2001, shows us what we've lost.

Almost half of the volume is made up of work that 'appears for the first time in this anthology' — meaning, I assume, work-in-progress, yet to be contracted to a publisher, unedited except, perhaps, by Craven. But I couldn't establish from the limited notes provided which were extracts from works the author regarded as 'ready' for publication and which were still working drafts. Not knowing this affects the way we read them — and does the writer a disservice.

The attractions of almost all the inclusions are clear enough but several suffer from the faults of early drafts or immature writing — bristling with adjectives, careless repetitions, telling too much or too little — and sitting rather oddly alongside 'the Best'. Some extracts are decidedly baggy, several no more than promising fragments, which the authors are bound to want to rework for future publication.

Literary magazines have traditionally been outlets for writers seeking to publish part of a work-in-progress, perhaps because publication in book form is a kind of Rubicon. Once out there, the work has a life of its own, having flown the coop. It cannot be easily taken back and returned to a fluid state of composition. In any case, and curiously, literary magazines are a very minor source for this volume — only five stories out of twenty-four, two from Granta, one from Meanjin and two from Southerly, nothing from HEAT or any of the others — a fact which Craven might have commented upon.

I can hear him at my elbow growling that this kind of distinction between published and unpublished work doesn't matter any longer, that most literary magazines aren't where he'd go now for 'the Best', that established protocols for publication are unnecessary straitjackets, rightly discarded. I doubt if he'd actually let himself say that critical and editorial apparatus is not required if we are in the hands of a selector/editor we can trust — but that is the unfortunate implication. And it leaves him wide open.

Of course, deep reader and good critic that he so often is, Craven could list on the back of an envelope those writers he knows who have things on the boil, recent work waiting to be solicited, contributions to be cajoled into being, edited here and there, and promoted as 'the Best'. But it's getting pretty close to hubris and runs the risk of short-changing writers and readers.

The nearest thing to a literary mugging I've read for a long time was Craven's review last October in The Age of Richard Flanagan's novel Gould's Book of Fish. The first chapter had been awarded 'Best story' status in the 1999 volume, but somehow, in the space of twelve months or so, the 'phantasmagoric allurements of a fictional universe that is like the Tasmanisation of an idea from Borges while remaining shaggy, ambling and full of wild oscillations' had evaporated. Flanagan's idiosyncratic style so admired in a fragment from a work-in-progress was now found to be tiresome and seriously flawed.

I disagree, but that's not the point. Editing of an extract from a work-in-progress is fraught and has to be redone when the whole is read. No full length work of fiction, however strong, should be judged on the strength of a single chapter. The finished book turned out differently from Craven's idea of it, and the critical disjuncture did no one any good.

Extensive collections like these of established and new writers can highlight shifts in Australian literary culture and inform our reading. That Craven doesn't choose to tease them out this year is a pity, since he is more experienced and better placed to do so than most. Instead, his Introduction comes uncomfortably close to puffery in spots — plot summaries, with occasional, and sometimes perfunctory, comparisons with international names: Joyce, Marquez, Rushdie, McEwan.

Australian fiction only rarely engages with political issues and even less frequently does it well. Here, Grenville, Rayson, Mears and Mahood, driven perhaps by the desire to look the Hanson and Ruddock effect in the eye, write about the land in the voices of the men and women who inhabit it. Several men, on the other hand, are writing out of smaller — they once used to be called domestic — palettes of 'relationships' and sexuality.

Robyn Davidson's story 'The First Sense' — about music and her father — is probably an extract from the same unpublished work that led off the collection of Best Australian Essays 2000. That extract was 'more powerful than most fiction', said Craven in his Introduction that year. The slide between fiction and memoir can be exhilarating but, as a reader, I need to know what is going on here. Has Davidson repositioned the work? Has Craven?

At its best, Craven's literary journalism and criticism encourage the writer, illuminate the text, and leave room for alternative readings. It's a pity he didn't feel like being a little more forthcoming this year — and, perhaps, more rigorous. The book would have been stronger if it had been shorter. Publishing initiatives like The Best Australian Stories and Essays are fragile if they are taken for granted. Readers don't always come back for more.