Reviewed by Rama Gaind.
Edited by Ashley Hay, Griffith University, $27.99.
Sometimes, escapism is all we need. When looking for a diversion, we ‘plot the course of our daydreams, our transformations and our jailbreaks. It takes us across borders and through open minds to places once out of reach, lighting out for the territory to access new worlds’.
From mermaids and space matriarchs to fresh starts and flights of fancy, Escape Routes explores what it means to break out and break free. Editor Ashley Hay elaborates: “An escape of some sort is a key aspect of many stories, as part of a character’s quest, their redress, their transcendence or evolution. Perhaps a hankering for escape – of any kind – is about as universal a thing as there is, albeit formed by the different causes and conditions that might generate it: curiosity or circumstance, inequity or incarceration, discovery or disillusion, a lack of agency or a surfeit of disaster.”
This year the spine of Griffith Review 74 is made up of works by four winners of the inaugural Griffith Review Emerging Voices competition: The Menaced Assassin by Vijay Khurana, Camelopard by Andrew Roff, Emily Presents by Alison Gibbs and Americano Sal by Declan Fry.
“Together this quartet reveals misplaced and displaced lives and loves; intersections between spectacle and mortality; revelations of the impossibility of escape – or deceit – in a hyper-connected world. Their rich mix of voices, styles and concerns moves from Fry’s Hemingway-esque narrator to Roff’s surreal uber-mascot, from the Frankensteinian resurrection of a long-dead literary megastar to the riskier celebrity of a posting and performative age.”
These pieces join others to create an “atlas of experience – the experience of children, caretakers, tourists, mermaids, immigrants, astronauts, optimists, mourners, brothers, artists and more. These characters dig their fingers deep into the earth, dive deep into the ocean, stretch their gaze beyond the sky. They bear witness; they remember; they rescue and reinvent. They attempt to transcend who and how they are. They fail. They succeed.”
