What I Have Written: A Novel of Erotic Obsession

I thoroughly endorse the remarks of Steven Reynolds regards the seriousness & elegance of Scott's work. Scott has an established place in Australian literature. His extensive catalogue of published poetry & novels has given him unrivalled tenure in the zone of language capable of gripping visceral levels of relationships & their corrosive power. However, I want to promote Scott's most recent fiction, Warra Warra.Perhaps wary of his literary position & of being pigeon-holed as a writer's writer, he has directed his deft skills at the political & geographic Australian landscape with this ghost story. Forgive the pun, but I am haunted by this book and the realisation that so many Australians endorse the heartless agenda of the current government's attitude to political refugees and its pre-emptive agression in recent military forays under the guise of a war on Terrorism. The book opens with a set of tender images of a sleepy, backwater town, Warra Warra(translating as 'Bugger Off' in some indigeous language of N.S.W), the denizens about their tasks, blithely unaware of the outside world. The country and its people are wrapped in bracing, fresh language, as affectionately evoked as the spell woven by Dylan Thomas in Milkwood. This is abruptly terminated by a plane crash. The shock of falling debris & burnt flesh is devastatingly related. The means the townsfolk adopt to cope with the situation is a triumph of imagination, as much as it is of Scott's wordplay. The core action unravels 'the hallucination produced in the living by the unconscious action of the mind of the dreaming dead.'About 300 total. That individual characterisation is minimal allows us to attend to the collective consciousness: this cocooned community's response to the ghosts of the wreckage, to absorb their otherness, grounding them, and assisting their passage to rest. This, like much of Scott's work, is a prescient, compelling and compassionate piece.

The Editorial Reviewers seem to have missed the point. "What I Have Written" is a chilling, elaborate and meticulously worked out presentation of what we see, in the end, is a shocking and simple story. But Scott gives his tale a complex, three-part presentation so that for us, like his characters, the search for verification - for meaning - is constantly frustrated. And that becomes a kind of meaning in itself. What faith can we put in words? In letters? Postcards? Autobiography? Fiction? Scott's subject here is writing, and the meaning we make of it. That, and the notion that art can do violence to the lives it touches by way of appropriation. Though it is easily one of the most thoughtful, original and fascinating Australian novels of the last thirty years, and deserving winner of 1994 Victorian Premier's Prize for Fiction, "What I Have Written" is not a happy book. Emotionally bleak and at times sexually explicit (though never unnecessarily), it explores a grim terrain that not all readers will find appealing. But those who do enjoy the dark intelligence which lurks here will certainly appreciate Scott's latest novel, "The Architect" (2001). There, it is utterly relentless. Those who admire Scott's observations on relationships and the nature of memory will be better served by the equally engrossing "Before I Wake" (1996).