I was involved in the Meanjin Tournament of Books as a guest reviewer. The two female literary titans pitted against each other in my heat were Alexis Wright (‘Carpentaria’) and Cate Kennedy (‘The World Beneath’). My adjudication is available here.

It’s my great pleasure to be involved in something as sublimely unjust as this. Two novelists who have won critical and reader acclaim, thrown into a ring and asked to slug it out, sort of like the cage fight scenes in Mad Max Beyond the Thunderdome. Never mind that the books have disparate themes and textures. Never mind that both are successful in achieving their aims. Two are going in. One is coming out. It’s like the America’s Cup of writing. It’s maybe even like the America’s Cup in that year when the New Zealanders turned up with a catamaran.

Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria is full of watery imagery of a significantly higher calibre than the stuff you waded through at the end of the last paragraph. It is set in the dislocated, north country town of Desperance. Normal Phantom is a man who strings up and embalms prawns — making him, in my experience, literature’s greatest seafood taxidermist. He is also a fisherman, a navigator, a storyteller, a survivor, a patriarch, and a suspected murderer, and it is through his salt encrusted eyes that we experience much of the Gulf country.

Alongside Norm is an expansive cast. His wife, Angel Day, ‘Queen of the Rubbish Dump’, is feisty, sharp of tongue and a master scavenger, who reignites the tribal war that divides Pricklebush into East and West. Mozzie Fishman with his ‘Clint Eastwood face’, leads strange backcountry convoys of Fords and Holdens along traditional migration lines. Elias Smith walks in from the sea, is hailed by the whites of Uptown as a prophet, before he walks out to sea again as a pariah. Mayor Bruiser is a murderer, a rapist, a brutaliser of children, and a winner of Desperance’s Citizen of the Year award for ten straight years. A policeman called Truthful is sleeping with Norm’s tough talking daughter, Girlie. The Gurfurrit mining company has a ruthless, psychopathic eye to the riches of the Gulf, and Norm’s son Will Phantom — the Westend Romeo who fell in love with an Eastend Juliet — is the man to wage the guerrilla war.

Story threads abound. Tribal rivalry, marital infidelity, killer bush pigs, race riots, murder, deaths in custody, revenge killing, corporate greed, sabotage and apocalyptic natural disaster. The issue I have with Carpentaria is the shape of these stories. At the start of Chapter Two, Wright uses a typically lovely phrase, ‘Anyone can find hope in the stories. The big stories and the little ones In between’. What I hoped for was a dominant big story. A main narrative. On about page 170, a body turned up in the middle of a lake and I almost cheered. Now this book’s really about to motor, I thought. But it sort of didn’t. Instead, Wright teases us with further disjointed morsels — constantly interrupting the gathering human drama with lengthy, magical, spiritual encounters that stalled this reader’s momentum.

Thematically, this is part of what Wright is intending. The novel begins with the ‘ancestral serpent, larger than storm clouds’ and ends with the town of Desperance dissolving against the power of nature. The squabbles of people, from the mundane to the murderous, are rendered miniscule when set against the permanence of country. But nevertheless, I found it a difficult book. Too many spirits. Too many visions. Too many four page interludes staring through the water at gropers.

Cate Kennedy’s The World Beneath is also infused with spirituality. In particular, the sort of trendy non-deific spirituality that now seems to blow the Tibetan prayer flags of middle class life. Sandy makes jewellery that her emo-inclined, 15 year old daughter Sophie dismisses as ‘hippie-bling’. She is also into aromatherapy, organic gardening, and listening to CDs such as the hilarious titled Spirit of the Loon.

We encounter Sandy and Sophie at a time when Sophie’s estranged father, Rich, is seeking to re-enter his daughter’s life. Sandy met and fell into a sleeping bag with Rich at the Franklin Dam blockade back in 1983. The hot fire of political protest led to a passionate romance that included all night solstice parties and yurts (‘whatever happened to yurts?’) but later cooled and then imploded shortly after Sophie’s birth. Rich ran away, scared off by the handcuffs of domestic life. But now, fourteen years later, he’s back, seeking permission to take his troubled, incommunicative, anorexic daughter hiking in Tasmania.

Sandy is horrified by the thought. Although she has kept an ear open for any news concerning Rich, she has never forgiven him for his abandonment. Nevertheless, Sophie convinces her, softening the blow by reminding Sandy that the Mandala Holistic Wellness Centre is running its ‘Inner Goddess’ retreat for the same week.

It’s a beautiful, simple set up. When Sandy whispers in Rich’s ear at the departure lounge, ‘If you harm one hair on her head … believe me, you will pay,’ the reader’s ear is attuned to one thing — trouble in Tasmania.

Rich has a ponytail, which itself usually means trouble. He’s also single, and uses the line ‘I work in television. I’m a freelance editor’, to impress his daughter, just as he would a date. As with most things about Rich, there’s less to the story than he claims. ‘Working in television’ is code for cutting together infomercials. ‘Professional photographer’ means the odd photo published a decade previously. He has outward charm, a belief in his own talent, and a list of excuses as to why things haven’t really worked out.

The World Beneath, apart from being funny, is full of wisdom on parenting, love, failed relationships (both spousal and parental), teenage angst, and even protest movements. ‘Will. You. Just stop talking about the fucking Franklin,’ Sophie explodes, in a tirade that could have been directed at either of her parents. Kennedy’s descriptions of Tasmania are terrific, and some of the best laughs are had out on the Cradle Mountain track, as unprepared, brittle Rich has to cope with the scroggin infused wisdom of scout masterly Russell: ‘And you can use those elastic bands to extend the length of the elastic on your tent fly too.’

Nevertheless, step after blister effected step, we know that something is coming, and when it does, Kennedy produces a literal cliff-hanger.

I really enjoyed The World Beneath. I also liked Carpentaria, particularly the section relating to the death of Gordie and the arrest of the petrol sniffing boys. But whereasThe World Beneath drew me along, it was me who did much of the pushing through Carpentaria. There’s not necessarily any justice in this, and I’m covered in the stench of subjectivity — but I’ll go with The World Beneath.

WINNER: THE WORLD BENEATH