The Victoria Principle

Michael Farrell is a highly regarded Australian poet, whose poems are remarkable for their surreal images, their sensitivity to language, and recently, for their story-telling qualities. In his new collection The Victoria Principle, Farrell turns from poems to short stories, to give full range to the thoughts that drive his writing.

The stories often begin with a curious subject or connection the fear of birds, a nude writing retreat in Nova Scotia, Nirvana's song 'Smells like Teen Spirit' and a boiled egg, or the study of metaphysics in the Middle Ages and the early death of singer-songwriter Andy Gibb. They then proceed by a series of elaborations to unpack the associations that have gathered in the writer's mind. The associations may appear strange or even absurd, but the process has its own logic we may think of these fictions as 'thought stories' rather than short stories.

Beneath their playful surface, they engage deep emotions, about the writer's family, his Catholic background, his life as a gay man, his writing and his nervous breakdown, with its attendant phobias, depression and hospitalisation. Here fiction's collision with memoir produces not only auto- or meta-fictions, but also ridges of the metaliterary: metacriticism; metapoetics.