In an Australian country town in the mid-1960s, a couple of adolescent boys are busy experimenting with incendiary devices while their town, including their school, is suffering a series of arson attacks. Are the boys responsible? At least, in part? Or is there something larger afoot? And how did it all go so dreadfully wrong?
Meanwhile, in a small city not far away, another group of boys, somehow connected to those in the other place, get up to their own mischief playing with fire. This, too, with a whiff of the infernal, goes badly.
The interlocking stories of Playing with Mischief are an exercise in smoke and mirrors. Along with real smoke, of which there is plenty, the stories are infused with a figurative smoke that obscures who is responsible for what. As to mirrors, consider the manner in which the diverse perspectives of these stories reflect back through one another. And then, beyond such obvious references, we should consider fiction's overarching artifice, in which Willis saw an affinity to the legerdemain of fairground magicians, the archetypical practitioners of smoke and mirrors.
Playing with Mischief (the title itself suggests an alternative: Playing with Fire) is also an exercise in stylistic variation. The paired novellas, Mischief and The Fires, third and first person narratives respectively, are bookended by the shorter pieces, Invocation and The Exercise Book, distinctly at opposite ends of the stylistic spectrum. These different, to some extent contending voices enhance the basic mirroring effect between the competing narratives. Or, to shift the metaphor, they create a space in which whispered implications echo.
An invocation of a world gone by, a world in which ghosts still wandered foggy streets and sometimes it was better to consult a priest than a doctor.
An Australian country town in the mid-1960s.
Teenage boys playing with guns and gunpowder.
A series of suspicious fires.
Where the fuse led was clear, but who struck the match was not so evident.
Afterword by Josephine Tey.
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Produkt-Hinweis
Dateigröße
ISBN-13
978-0-6451884-3-1 (9780645188431)
Schweitzer Klassifikation
H.A. Willis was born at Colac and grew up in Apollo Bay, Kyneton and Ballarat. He subsequently lived in Darwin, Auckland (1970-80) and rural Tasmania before settling with his wife and two young sons in Perth in late 1981.
As a student at La Trobe University in the late 1960s, Willis was part of a group that wrote and produced the first issue of Cinema Papers (Oct 1967). While studying at the University of Auckland, he was a founding member of Alternative Cinema, an Auckland film-makers' cooperative established in 1972. He contributed articles to and edited several early issues of that group's journal, Alternative Cinema. Willis later (1976) wrote an in-depth account of the New Zealand film industry for Cinema Papers.
In 1974-5 Willis produced a half-hour television documentary, Stanley. This concerned the twelve-day manhunt (in October 1941) for mass killer Stanley Graham. Based on his interviews with participants in the manhunt, and his access to the previously closed Police files, Willis went on to write Manhunt, the most detailed and definitive account of the event. The feature film Bad Blood, based on his book, starred Jack Thompson and Carol Burns.
Willis has been involved in two aspects of the Australian "History Wars". When Keith Windschuttle published The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, Volume One (2002), Willis undertook a detailed analysis of the author's cited sources in order to dispute his figure for Tasmanian Aborigines killed during hostilities in Van Diemen's Land. In relation to that debate, Robert Manne described Willis as "a conservative scholar ... known for his scrupulousness". In 2010, he joined the debate over the introduction and history of smallpox in Australia, arguing that the origin of the 1789 outbreak near Sydney was most likely from a Macassan introduction through Northern Australia.
As a non-fiction editor, Willis prepared for publication (including the title) The Last of the Last (2009), the autobiography of Claude Choules, the last combat veteran of World War I. At the time of publication Choules was 108, making him the world's oldest first time author. Other titles edited by Willis include From Kastellorizo (2006), Michael (Stratos) Jack Kailis's memoir of his extended family, and Nurses with Altitude (2008), a collection of stories by Western Australian nurses of the Royal Flying Doctor Service.
Between 1982 and 1991 Willis published eleven short stories in various literary journals, including Overland, Australian Short Stories, Brave New Word, Going Down Swinging, The Weekend Australian, and Island Magazine. In 2010, he indexed and was one of the editorial annotators of The Australind Journals of Marshall Waller Clifton 1840-1861. In 2011 he wrote the introductory essay to a reprinted edition of Thermo-Electrical Cooking Made Easy, by Nora Curle-Smith, first published in Kalgoorlie in 1907, and claimed to be the world's first cookbook for an electric stove.
