CMIS Evaluation Fiction Focus

When Requiem for a Beast was awarded the CBCA Picture Book of the Year in August, the critics came out in unprecedented numbers. Matt Ottley, the CBCA judges and the organisation’s National President were personally vilified and the hate mail flowed in. Such a strong reaction for a book that had languished almost unnoticed until then. Some of the loudest voices even later privately admitted that they had not read it before condemning it publicly.

In the intervening months, Matt has had time to heal and reflect. In the annual Leslie Rees lecture last night at the Fremantle Children’s Literature Centre, Matt examined the relationship between critics and art – a long history in which he is in good company.

Matt acknowledges that although his lecture was titled The Art of Corrupting Youth, he doesn’t really know how to do it. It’s just that people – many people – have told him he has. Corrupted youth that is.

From James Lorimer (1849) on Emily Bronte : “Here all the faults of ‘Jane Eyre’ are magnified a thousand fold and the only consolation which we have in reflecting upon it is that it will never be generally read.” to the brouhaha about Pollock’s Blue Poles, with Beethoven (‘musical anarchy’) and countless others who have challenged artistic boundaries in between, Matt is in excellent company. The true test will be time. Will we look back at Requiem in years to come and wonder what the fuss was all about?

It is to be hoped that Matt will find the time to publish his lecture so that many more people than were present last night can enjoy the philosophical underpinning of his theories. Impossible to do justice here, but in a nutshell, the Western tradition is to think cyclically, so that at the beginning of a new cycle of artistic thought we haven’t yet learned the language and all but a few are fearful or dismissive. With time, if the art is good, it is referenced by others, we become familiar with the language and look back to the original and appreciate it for the groundbreaking idea it was.

Artist, musician, or writer? Matt Ottley is all three in equal parts. Musician Matt composed a short sonata to reinforce the notion of cyclical thinking. The form is a perfect cycle – new musical idea, variations on the theme creating aural familiarity, returning to the now familiar and no-longer-new starting point, which also becomes the conclusion.

Frane Lessac and Liliana Stafford both gave moving readings of the work of the late Leslie Rees, whom the lecture honours.

Matt’s latest book, a collaboration with John Marsden, has just been released. Home and Away will not sit quietly on the shelves either.

Previous CMIS Fiction Focus blog posts about Requiem for a Beast