Hasluck, Nicholas 1942-

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HASLUCK, Nicholas 1942-

PERSONAL: Born October 17, 1942, in Canberra, Australia; son of Paul (a historian) and Alexandra (a historian; maiden name, Darker) Hasluck; married Sally Anne Bolton (a museum curator), April 16, 1966; children: Anthony Guy, Lindsay Robert. Ethnicity: "Australian." Education: University of Western Australia, LL.B., 1964; Oxford University, B.C.L., 1966.

ADDRESSES: Home—14 Reserve St., Claremont, Western Australia 6010, Australia. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER: Keal Brinsden (law firm), Perth, Australia, partner, 1970-84; barrister in private practice, 1985—. Australia Council, deputy chair, 1978-82.

MEMBER: Order of Australia.

AWARDS, HONORS: Award for book of the year, Age Monthly, 1984, for The Bellarmine Jug; Premier's Fiction Prize, 1991, for The Country without Music.

WRITINGS:

novels

Quarantine, Macmillan (London, England), 1978, Holt (New York, NY), 1979.

The Blue Guitar, Macmillan (London, England), 1980, Holt (New York, NY), 1981.

The Hand That Feeds You: A Satiric Nightmare, Fre-mantle Arts Centre Press (Fremantle, Western Australia, Australia), 1982.

The Bellarmine Jug, Penguin (Ringwood, Victoria, Australia), 1984.

Truant State, Penguin (Ringwood, Victoria, Australia), 1987, Penguin (New York, NY), 1988.

The Country without Music, Viking (Ringwood, Victoria, Australia), 1990.

The Blosseville File, Penguin (Ringwood, Victoria, Australia), 1992.

A Grain of Truth, Penguin (Ringwood, Victoria, Australia), 1994.

Our Man K, Penguin (Ringwood, Victoria, Australia), 1999.

other

Anchor and Other Poems, Fremantle Arts Centre Press (Fremantle, Western Australia, Australia), 1976.

The Hat on the Letter O and Other Stories, Fremantle Arts Centre Press (Fremantle, Western Australia, Australia), 1978.

(With William Grono) On the Edge (poetry), Freshwater Bay Press (Claremont, Western Australia, Australia), 1981.

(With C. J. Koch) Chinese Journey (poetry), Fremantle Arts Centre Press (Fremantle, Western Australia, Australia), 1985.

Collage: Recollections and Images of the University of Western Australia, Fremantle Arts Centre Press (Fremantle, Western Australia, Australi), 1987.

Offcuts: From a Legal Literary Life, University of Western Australia Press (Nedlands, Western Australia, Australia), 1993.

(Editor and author of introduction) Paul Hasluck, The Chance of Politics, Text Publishing (Melbourne, Australia), 1997.

The Legal Labyrinth: The Kisch Case and Other Reflections on Law and Literature, Freshwater Bay Press (Claremont, Western Australia, Australia), 2003.

SIDELIGHTS: Australian writer Nicholas Hasluck has gained particular renown for his fiction. Louis James in Contemporary Novelists found a "combination of intrigue, dark humour, and fable" to be "characteristic of Hasluck's style."

Hasluck's first novel, Quarantine, concerns a group of passengers who are subjected to unspecified quarantine while attempting to pass through the Suez Canal. The novel's hero, an unnamed law student, eventually surmises that the travelers are victims of obscure bureaucratic complications, and he preoccupies himself with observations and considerations of the group's peculiar plight. As days become weeks, however, the various passengers, who have been detained at a filthy station situated in a bleak and barren area, grow restless and plot to negotiate their way to freedom. But this scheme, engineered by one of the group's more opportunistic members, fails to bring about their release and leads, instead, to violence and the further degeneration of the hapless band's already precarious situation. Martin Lebowitz, in his review for the Chicago Tribune Book World, compared Quarantine to both Albert Camus's The Plague and Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot, and he pronounced Hasluck's account "a fascinating first novel." James concluded that Quarantine displays a "brand of mordant absurdism."

Hasluck's next novel, The Blue Guitar, is a concentrated depiction of thirty-four-year-old entrepreneur Dyson Garrick during a few pivotal days. Garrick hopes to market a mechanical guitar invented by his German friend Hermann. Already deep in debt, Garrick dodges his creditors and federal investigators while pitching his unlikely commodity to potential investors, including both financiers and loan sharks. While he futilely hustles about the city, an industrial center in Australia, Garrick also manages to lose his mistress and further infuriate his ex-wife, from whom he steals at one point. Eventually, Garrick's desperation compels him to execute an unethical business maneuver, one that causes him to lose Hermann's friendship even as it stabilizes—at least temporarily—his own finances. Garrick's "quest is idealistic (the title directs us to Wallace Stevens's poem 'Things as they are are changed by the blue guitar') but also tangled in the temptations of commercial exploitation, and this conflict leads to Garrick's own moral disintegration as he finally betrays his friend," wrote James.

Among the enthusiasts of The Blue Guitar was New York Times Book Review contributor Jeffrey Burke, who reported that with this novel Hasluck had produced a "character study [that] is entertaining and insightful." Tom Clark declared in his review for the Los Angeles Times that Hasluck's novel "is a vivid account of life in the contemporary hells of getting and spending." Clark added that The Blue Guitar is evidence that Hasluck possesses both "a fine novelist's narrative skills and complexity of vision."

The Bellarmine Jug concerns the discovery of a historical manuscript that undermines long-held perceptions of Dutch activities in Indonesia. Cold War intrigue ensues, with authorities determined to expose a British spy, one who allegedly revealed nuclear test sites to the Soviets in the 1940s. Times Literary Supplement contributor Jim Crace called The Bellarmine Jug an "entertaining and provoking novel." According to James, "The Bellarmine Jug explores the roots of Australian identity on both personal and social levels, using techniques from the spy thriller and a legal examination that probes each layer of truth to reveal alternative realities…. The novel rates amongst the finest Australian novels of the 1980s."

Hasluck's novel Truant State relates a British family's experiences after relocating to Australia following World War I. The Travernes settle next to the Guys, whose patriarch, Romney, is an ingratiating con artist. Soon the Travernes' patriarch, Henry, is lured into one of Romney's schemes, one that leads to ruin. Narrating these and other events is Henry's son, Jack, who courts Romney's daughter, Diana, and involves himself in politics during the Great Depression. "The novel," wrote James, "which shows Hasluck's characteristic interweaving of personal, social, and metaphysical issues, with detective intrigue, is remarkable for its regional evocation of the fictional Butler's Swamp and Western Australia between the wars."

The Country without Music, The Blosseville File, and A Grain of Truth chronicle the history of a fictional French colony in the southwest corner of Western Australia which, in the course of time, develops into a separate country within the larger land mass. Hasluck uses this fictional setting to comment on contemporary Australian society and to explore the evolution of national identity. The Country without Music focuses on the islands of Baie de Baudin, whose history is retold through various narrators associated with its past. Helen Daniel, in her book Liars, called the novel "a work of imaginative energy and intellectual elegance."

The Blosseville File spotlights Lucien Chabot, a freelance journalist commenting on various aspects of life in the former French colony of Blosseville. His observations are fueled by collected clippings and photographs about the people and places of the community. In his musings he offers opinions on subjects such as computer technology, discrimination against minorities, and the undependable nature of writing. In addition to praising the satirical tone of the work, reviewers admired the poignancy of one of the novel's final sketches—a farewell scene between father and son. Regarding The Blosseville File, Rod Moran of the West Australian stated: "It has the shrewdness of observation, eloquence, humour, and delicate sensitivity to the currents and textures of human reality that are hallmarks of both his fiction and poetry."

In A Grain of Truth Hasluck tells of "the lawyer Michael Cheyne, [who] finds himself standing for human rights against the weight of apparent justice within the legal system," wrote James. "The novel, which has an optimistic ending, underlines Hasluck's conviction that life is a conflict between the structures of social order—exemplified by the law—and the anarchy that lies at the core of human experience."

Hasluck once described his novels to CA as "moral thrillers, the plots taut and intricate. Caught up in events which work in collusion to obscure moral choices, the characteristic figure struggles to construct his own ethical framework."