A riot of in-jokes

Almost 120 years ago, the Australian writer Henry Lawson offered some counsel to those who came after him, writing that his

advice to any young Australian writer whose talents have been recognised would be to go steerage, stow away, swim and seek London, Yankeeland or Timbucktoo rather than stay in Australia till his genius turn to gall or beer. Or failing this — and still in the interests of human nature and literature — to study elementary anatomy, especially as applies to the cranium, and then shoot himself carefully with the aid of a looking-glass.

Lawson’s words don’t provide the epigraph to Ryan O’Neill’s blackly hilarious and structurally audacious debut novel, Their Brilliant Careers, although his bleak assessment of the prospects for anyone foolish enough to try to eke out a literary career in Australia certainly informs it at almost every level.

The Winner of Australia’s Prime Minister’s award for fiction, Their Brilliant Careers is composed of 16 capsule biographies of Australian writers, together with a foreword and an extended afterword by the book’s author. The only catch is that the writers are all invented, while the Ryan O’Neill responsible for the book is not Ryan O’Neill, celebrated short story writer, but Ryan O’Neill, unsuccessful and embittered literary historian who wrote the overlooked history of the Australian short story, Ordinary People Doing Everyday Things in Commonplace Settings, and the seminal Sacred Kangaroos: Fifty Overrated Australian Novels, as well as one sadly neglected collection of short fiction, The Weight of a Human Heart (this last one is real, and was published in the UK in 2012).

The writers covered are nothing if not various. At one end of the spectrum there is the odious body-builder, fascist and suspected murderer, Rand Washington, author of the Cor Saga, a series of explicitly racist pulp novels set on a planet on which a ‘savage, untrustworthy, genetically inferior tribe of evil blacks’ have wrested power from their white masters.