Shirl (Affirm Press 2020), the debut collection of short stories by Wayne Marshall, is a quirky, courageous, imaginative and outrageous book, undercut by a seam of tenderness and humility and an ever-present sense of humanity and mortality.
Fans of Julie Koh, Jane Rawson and Ryan O’Neill will appreciate Marshall’s wry sense of humour and his outlandish and creative sense of fun. Every story is imbued with a touch of magical realism but in the most unexpected ways. The collection has a couple of themes. One is the Aussie culture, particularly masculinity and the mannerisms and collective idiosyncrasies of ‘true-blue Aussie blokes’. Marshall manages to poke fun at stereotypes and see the humorous side of truisms whilst also acknowledging that he is doing just that, and demonstrating that maybe – underneath the bravado – men are still capable of vulnerability, compassion, emotion and sadness, despite the hard carapace they may show to the world (and more pertinently, to their families and closest friends). Another theme is illness – Marshall was diagnosed with bowel cancer at a young age and his meditations and questions around illness, symptoms, treatments, fears and gratefulness are threaded throughout the stories, connecting them like a daisy chain.
Some of the stories are speculative fiction: The Telexican Brides; some appear at first to be ordinary narratives until something extraordinary happens: The Magpie Game, Cod Opening; some confront common Australian cultural mores such as sport (fishing, footy, cricket): Gibson’s Bat ‘n’ Ball, Our Year Without Footy, or alcohol consumption: Warrentopia. There’s a shark called Bruce that lives in the local pool; a Yowie yearning for company; a man who has fallen in love with a kangaroo. Several of the stories have appeared previously in literary journals and it is a sign of the strength of Marshall’s writing that even though I had read The Hearing in an issue of Kill Your Darlings Best Australian Fiction, re-reading it still felt fresh and new. Some of the stories eg The Phoenix Rising address fear and some, like Levitation, address hope. Some, like The Magicians, ask us to question how far we would go in the same situation. The final story, Weekend in Albury, features Marshall’s mother and is again a complex mix of truth and fiction.
All of the stories consider men, their relationships with each other and the dynamics between them and others. If you enjoyed The Hunter and Other Stories of Men by David Cohen, this will have a similar appeal.
What sets this collection apart, however, is its thought-provoking exploration of the meaning of life, which is done through a combination of stories that are wholly fiction, and some that obviously incorporate true aspects of the author’s own life and experience. Sometimes these differences are obvious, and sometimes the reader is left truly wondering where the blurred boundary lies.