the ruby in the smoke / philip pullman (1985)

When Helen Garner was asked at the Melbourne Writers Festival (yes, I'm still milking it) about the books she loved, she said that the last books she had read with a kind of crazed greed were Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy. Those are absolutely three of my favourite books in the world. I read that series ensconced in bed, the diary cleared, and tea and biscuits within reach.

It's not uncommon for writers to have hits and misses - I loved all of Tamora Pierce's books but I couldn't get through a single of one of her Circle of Magic books. So, on the same logic, I never sought out Pullman's Sally Lockhart books (the first of which is The Ruby in the Smoke). Finding it in the City Library last week, then, was a wildly mixed blessing. But I needn't have worried because the first page is an absolute ripper. I won't spoil it, but it's a good one.

The Ruby in the Smoke is set in London some time in the 1800s. Yes, I found this book in the YA section, but there are things in this book that would have the anti-Harry Potter brigade tutting for sure. Sally Lockhart is a very pretty 16-year old who carries a gun and doesn't take to officious authority, but she also loves accounting and knows obscure things about photography. Plus she speaks Hindustani. If I had kids I'd much rather have them reading about her than the Olsen twins.

The titular smoke refers to opium, and Sally comes across the wretchedness brought upon the Chinese and British people unfortunate enough to come across it during her search for what happened to her father. In Sally Lockhart, Pullman has given us a wondrously human heroine who is loyal, brave and capable, just like Lyra after her. Though there's no comparison between this book and the His Dark Materials books in terms of scope (which dealt with God and parallel universes, for crying out loud) The Ruby in the Smoke is certainly equal in compassion, excitement and intrigue.

the belgariad series / david eddings (1980s)

Boy grows up in bucolic setting with beautiful but strict aunt and listens to the stories of a grizzled visiting traveller; a band of strangers start poking around, forcing him and some companions to leave the farm where he grew up; boy eventually finds out he has to save the world, and of course he does. Keep reading if the previous and the words 'Orb' (yes, with the capital letter) and 'dryad' don't make you dry-retch.

This series was recommended to me as an exemplar of the quickie quest-fantasy genre. David Eddings' author profile states that the five books making up the Belgariad series were writen 'in an effort to develop certain technical and philosophical ideas concerning' the fantasy genre. The technical motive is obvious here; these books are pretty close to a scientific foray into fantasy as I (an enthusiastic but not very well-versed consumer of fantasy books) have ever seen. Well-paced, internally consistent, mostly powerfully characterised, it's as digestible as strawberries with cream; move along if you're after Tolkien-esque three-page tree songs.

The series tracks the life of Garion, a charmingly incurious farmboy who, among other things, lacks the facility to attend to multiple and not-very-subtle hints about his destiny. He is therefore amusingly surprised each time he finds out the nature of his next mammoth responsibility. He's a bit dull but entirely sympathetic--loving, loyal and possessed of equal amounts of power and humbleness. Garion walks into danger with a bravery that every lonely kid wishes they could harness. Well, that's from my experience reading in the bushes in primary school, but it's probably not just kids--the fourth book, for example, was reprinted ten times in nine years and there is another five-book series which details the later lives of the characters. Can I say cash cow? Moo.

I gave away the ending at the beginning of this post, but no one would be surprised that Belgarion (the kingly prefix comes into play once he becomes a sorcerer-adept) succeeds in his gauntlet of tricky tasks, despite the constant assertions by everyone from the gods to the dogs of his 50/50 chances. But no one reads fantasy to be radically surprised, horrified or disappointed; that's what George Orwell is for. Instead, the Belgariad features a rollicking admixture of magic, action and prophecy, and a cast of colourful characters with complex personal and political relationships. Only one major false note is struck, and that is the character Ce'Nedra, Garion's destined bride. Not only is her name plagued by an insufferable fantasy apostrophe, but her character breaks a great cardinal rule of fiction; she is distastefully unsympathetic. Screechy, jealous, passive-aggressive, manipulative and smug without the benefit of true villainy, she could have been turfed after the main event without any tears being shed on my behalf. One suspects Garion wouldn't have blinked an eye either.

the name of the rose / umberto eco (1980)

Nicolas Barker once said that 'all libraries lead threatened lives'. He should know – he, along with Cheryl Porter, oversees the Montefiascone Conservation Project, a conservation program focused on preserving the Seminario Barbarigo Library and its contents. A leaky bathroom was the culprit in that case, but the literary tumescence of Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose disfavours such banal malefactors in its case of library trouble. Though its ingredients – a dead man or two, a cast of clowns with reasons to hide, an appreciably brilliant outsider, his somewhat dull-headed companion – are conventional, The Name of the Rose is not caught by the evils of cardboard or cut-outs.

William of Baskerville, our Chief Inspector Wexford in this 14th-century mystery, having been invited to investigate a mysterious death at an (unnamed) abbey, finds there a hubbub formed by fear and defensive self-interest. It is unclear, as always in a whodunnit, how the detective will penetrate the monks' insular world. And it is a slippery orb, the sphere of the abbey; it is no mere drop of water whose quivering surface area allows access to anything solid and of weight. William and Adso, the sidekick narrator, visit at a messy time, with the abbey beleaguered not only because of the sudden death of a young monk, but also because of the fierce theological (and remember the historical setting – political) debates which all but obscure the devotion to God which forms the nominal anchor of the monks' community. Difference of opinion in the context of religion is easily ascribed import beyond the tickle of intellectual disagreement. Residents of the abbey routinely take sides in arguments about whether, for example, Christ ever laughed, the ramifications of which would be of dramatic significance for men who live and die by the Word. Each opinion is extravagantly coherent and extensive, the pleasurably painful result of being able to follow one's intellectual desire wherever it leads.

Against this background fraught with the patent lust for knowledge (and surely the repression of other lusts), the expression and attainment of it is understandably key. The library, from whose windows it seems the dead man fell, is an obvious place to start. But the library is closed to all but its keeper and his assistant, and the prohibition includes William. Eco, with his sheltering of the library from eager eyes, triggers a tide of thought, not dissimilar to that of Ahab pending his meeting with the white whale. What is the library, what is inside? What is a library? What does it represent? Who has been there, and can we enter? We are warned, though – its representative force, and its forbidding geography – 'A spiritual labyrinth, it is also a terrestrial labyrinth.'

Even before an original copy of the Magna Carta sold for $21.5 million last year, we have known that people will do wild things for words, the objects that contain them, and the ideas they represent. Words are weapons, symbols and sources of power, utterly dangerous. So it is no surprise when deaths start coming, thick and fast, and fingers are pointed with equal speed. Yet who could divine the perpetrator in such a rabble masquerading as an order? Logic, though William puts all his trust in it, can only do its compromised best in the face of lunacy.

The name and the rose exist together; the rose dies, and we are left only with the name. But what is the name without the rose? Eco implicates us all with this curtain-drawn view of the confusion wrought by words, those pretenders at clarity and meaning, which can baffle even and perhaps especially the learned. I bet those Carthusian monks never have problems like these.

illywhacker / peter carey (2001 ed, 1985)

My name is Herbert Badgery. I am a hundred and thirty-nine years old and something of a celebrity. They come and look at me and wonder how I do it. There are weeks when I wonder the same, whole stretches of terrible time. It is hard to believe you can feel so bad and still not die.

I popped my Peter Carey cherry with Illywhacker, Carey's second novel from 1985. I was disposed to like it before I had even opened it; the heavily typographic art characteristic of the UQP's pretty, lyrical covers - this edition is part of a series of re-releases done in 2001 - and the rough-cut pages give the book a wonderful aesthetic heft. And, apart from having received the Booker and The Age's blessings (shortlist and Book of the Year, respectively), Illywhacker was a loan from friends who gave it high praise.

As a useful epigraph supplies, an illywhacker is a professional trickster, someone who is putting a confidence trick over whatever audience is available. This is no idle descriptions; it is a warning. It is as if in the moment Herbert Badgery begins his little introduction, you are challenged not to be yet another wretched fool taken in by his words. Lying is an art, and Badgery a master painter. Yet Illywhacker is not just Badgery's story, and Badgery's words are not only lies. Lovers, parents, rivals, children all make up the raft of memorable characters, each of which is delivered as warm and vulnerable as a baby's delicate skull. For all his convoluted bluster, Herbert Badgery cannot hide the magnitude of their impact on his life's report. This book is an epic of grand proportions, an account of life that, while altered, is so complete as to put memory to shame.

How to describe the experience of reading my first Peter Carey novel? (For I'm sure I will read another.) Fond-eyed as a lover, I read every page with exigent attention. Carey is a radical storyteller, and his capacity for the precise evocation of detail is the alchemical complement to his fulsome imagination. By rights, Badgery's efforts to con and disappear should rankle. Since circumstances so disparate and overwhelming continue to threaten him and his family's well-being, a coherent family history seems unimaginable. But from the cutaneous to the vehicular, the historical to the magical, Illywhacker traverses the rich journeys taken by blood that is fatally flawed; blood which is, after all but finest filigree of the strongest steel.

the piano teacher / elfriede jelinek

oh vienna. you won't feel the same about the city again. the piano teacher stabs all the senses, a disparate flinging of words unified by the protagonist erika kohut's austerity and the author jelinek's control. to gingerly peer out at jelinek's vienna through peeled fingers is to chafe your hands as well.

with barely a hint of gentleness, the triangular becomes the linear as the imagined and actual interactions between erika, her mother and erika's student walter klemmer fail to resist the banality of infected self-awareness. though the main source of misery is patently the inflamed relationship between mother and daughter, much more in the novel than in michael haneke's 2001 film does the relationship between erika and klemmer attain its horrific and destructive character from the sense that they are both diseased, not just erika - two blind bulls thrusting their crenellated horns at one another.

the volatility of the interplay between the kohuts and klemmer eventually explodes in a painful, technicolour rumination on sequestration and etiolated delusion. though the novel thrusts individual acts of violence upon the reader, most terrible is erika's fate; she is not wholly self-destructive but is able to sustain her cursed context. an anti-triumphal masterpiece, the piano teacher's every word is lacerating.