Fugitive Pieces by Anne Michaels ended up on my reading list because the film version was shown at the Perth International Arts Festival (which is the umbrella festival for the Perth Writers Festival) this year. It should be said that I’m not usually a fan of films made from books (and wouldn’t often watch them) and going back to a book after seeing the film is an even rarer event for me, but the film version was just so beautiful that I wanted to relive it through the book.

And this book is marvellous, but – against all my usual judgments – not as good as the film! I won’t spoil it for you but basically the book follows a purely chronological timeline of the story, with a second narrator taking up the story in the final third or so of the book, almost like a book within a book. In the movie this narrator is introduced earlier, and although the story is thus altered a little, I thought it actually made more impact overall. Hard to explain without giving anything away, but I’d be curious to know what Anne Michaels herself thought about this change.

A completely different Festival inspiration is the first novel Red Dress Walking from S. A. Jones. “Serge” Jones impressed me at a panel I saw – she was lively and enthusiastic – and so I added her book to my library request list. When it arrived, I enjoyed the writing, but felt like it was a bit fluffy and put it aside for a while. Something made me continue though – it wasn’t exactly like fluffy chick-lit, there was something else there – and about halfway through the book my patience was rewarded and it really gripped me, with interesting perspectives on mental illnesses and great characters. To be honest, I’m not quite sure where this book fits in a genre sense and whether it’s really intended as chick-lit or literary fiction, but it seems to be hanging on the border in a somewhat precarious way. I suspect readers wanting some harmless chick-lit might have had the opposite reaction to me halfway through.

Another aspect of this book which intrigued me – largely because of my own way of thinking and writing – was how “locationless” it was. I spent large chunks of it thinking it was set in London only to be occasionally jolted back home by a very brief mention of something Australian. It was really a case of the characters and story being important and the larger context of the setting was utterly irrelevant. And of course, that’s fine, but I was surprised at how distressed it made me, I guess because I’m obsessed with setting and it really plays an important part in my writing. I was even more disturbed when I flicked back to the bio page and remembered that S. A. Jones lives here in Western Australia, because there’s no trace of Perth in the novel. All this strikes me as incredibly self-centered of me, to almost criticise a novel for its lack of setting – but perhaps what I’m trying to say is that it’s taught me a needed lesson in how setting and location are not always as important as I want them to be.