Kate Harrison, Island Marketing
The first David Ireland novel in 18 years will be serialised by Island magazine, it was announced today.
The novel, titled The World Repair Video Game, will be published in five instalments, beginning with the next issue of Island magazine (#140), available from March 30.
Bemused by the renewed interest in his work, following the reissuing of some of his previous novels in the Text Classics series, David Ireland said: ‘This is the first time any of my novels has been serialised. I’m greatly looking forward to having a copy in my hands and seeing how it looks. Serialising is such a great tradition. I’m in good company, thanks to Island magazine.’
‘Fortunately, it is a novel that benefits from reading slowly,’ said Island editor, Matthew Lamb, ‘with time to recover and ponder between each instalment, and with the opportunity to re-read before moving on to the next. It helps that Ireland’s novel is not plot-driven, but is animated rather by the interplay of ideas and character.’
The World Repair Video Game
Geordie Williamson, Island’s fiction editor, introducing the novel in an article in Saturday’s Weekend Australian, states: ‘Like The Chantic Bird, his 1968 debut, [The World Repair Video Game] tells the story of an outsider who constructs a personal philosophy that runs at widdershins to ‘ordinary’ society and then lives by it, making him either a madman or the clear-eyed ruler of a sovereign state. But where that first novel was charged with a young man’s energy, a punkish joie de vivre, this new work is characterised by the calm and quiet maturity of its narrator.’
In his column in the Weekend Australian, Stephen Romei, writes: ‘As someone who has read a bit of the author’s unpublished work, I’d classify The World Repair Video Game as classic late-Ireland: obsessive, creepy, philosophical, funny. It’s important to remember, reading any of Ireland’s novels, that he is a great satirist. The story is told in diary form by middle-aged Kennard Stirling, a family black sheep, an outsider, who lives on a bush block with his dog and who, you sense from the outset, is up to something awful, and not for the first time.’
Williamson adds: ‘Once again, Ireland has imagined an anti-hero appropriate to our times. Kennard is a deep ecologist in the sense that he does not place humans (or, at least, all humans) at the heart of calculations about the proper use and value of nature. Indeed, those who have previously criticised the author for the determined coarseness of his language will be stilled by the exquisite prose Kennard is granted to describe his private Eden. He relays an unfeigned love of animals and trees that stands quite apart from his pessimistic beliefs regarding the probable future of our race.’
This announcement comes on the back of several other announcements at Island magazine over the past month, and it is very much the culmination of these changes at the magazine that the David Ireland project is being introduced.
PRINT-ONLY
Earlier this year, it was announced that Island would be going print-only, with no online content or digital edition, but with a website and social media focused on providing subscriptions to the print issues. This was accompanied by a 200% increase in the print-run, and a more widely established national distribution.
MONA PARTNERSHIP
This idea of establishing Island as a print artefact coincides with the announcement that Island had forged a literary partnership with David Walsh and the Museum of Old and New Art (MONA).
In an introductory note to the next issue of Island – due out next week – Walsh writes: ‘my lust for literature, and my lust for collecting, has led me to seek a trophy journal.’ Lamb and Walsh see the partnership as essentially using MONA as a framing device to help put Island magazine – as a print artefact – on show, to help amplify its explorations of all aspects of literary culture.
MARSHALL MCLUHAN
This forthcoming issue of Island will also publish an edited excerpt from a recently uncovered book-length manuscript by renowned media theorist, Marshall McLuhan.
Completed in 1976, but unpublished due to illness and death, “The Future of the Library” successfully predicts the impact of information technology on libraries, but – perhaps more interestingly – it also shows the impact of libraries on information technology and publishing, in ways that are still relevant to us today.
In this essay, McLuhan states: ‘In industry there is an old saying: “If it works, it is obsolete.” We have been saying for some years that the book and printing are obsolete. Many people interpret this to mean that printing and the book are about to disappear. Obsolescence, in fact, means the opposite. It means that a service has become so pervasive that it permeates every area of a culture like the vernacular itself. Obsolescence, in short, ensures total acceptance and ever wider use.’
ISLAND 140
It is this logic that is behind Island’s move to go print-only. Moreover, it is McLuhan’s idea that media forms that have been previously rendered obsolete may very well be retrieved by the establishment of new media forms, that is behind Island’s attempt to retrieve the form of the serial novel, by publishing David Ireland’s The World Repair Video Game.
Island 140 will be published on Monday 30 March 2015.
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