Byline: Robert Manne

Helen Demidenko writes fiction. ROBERT MANNE finds it greatly disturbing. Illustration by John Spooner. LAST weekend it was revealed that the winner of this year's Miles Franklin Award, Helen Demidenko, was the daughter not, as she claims, of an illiterate Ukrainian taxi driver from Cairns, but of a Brisbane couple, Harry and Grace Darville, who arrived on our shores from nowhere more exotic than Scunthorpe. Even post-modernist geographers would, I imagine, be obliged to concede in the end that Scunthorpe is not in the Ukraine. Efforts to locate Markov Demidenko have proved no more fruitful than similar attempts, half a century ago, to locate Ern Malley's sister, Ethel. Even before the most recent surprise, Helen Demidenko's The Hand that Signed the Paper posed to the Australian literary culture a problem of some difficulty. Rarely has a first novel of an Australian author been more lavishly praised. Its admirers praise its stark honesty, its capacity to enter into the minds of those caught up in the business of mass murder and to restore to them their humanity, its understanding of the "ordinariness of evil" and its extraordinary "redemptive power". Yet rarely has a first Australian novel been more reviled. Its detractors see in it little but moral vacuity, vulgarity, historical ignorance and overt anti-Semitism. I belong to the second camp. In order to explain why, given that the literary world seems determined still to defend the merits of the book, one must turn not to the teller, but to the tale. THE novel opens in the voice of a bright Queensland university student, Fiona Kovalenko, the youngest daughter of a Ukrainian- Australian father and Irish-Australian mother. Yet, we are soon to learn, there is a shadow across her life. At the age of 12 she stumbled upon an envelope of wartime photographs in the top drawer of her father's bedside table. One was of "pits choked with bodies". It is one of her father's mementos from Babii Yar where he (Evheny) was present as a member of a pro-Nazi volunteer Ukrainian militia. At Babii Yar, on the outskirts of Kiev, in September 1941, 33,000 Jewish men, women and children were marched to a grave site and each one of them systematically shot. Fiona's mother is mildly reproving of her husband for having kept the photos. "You should have burnt those bloody things, Evheny. I've been saying that for years." Evheny sheds a tear. One day he will explain to Fiona what happened and why. As one critic has pointed out, the scene has the moral intensity of a family row after the discovery of a clandestine copy of Playboy. The memory of the photo stays with Fiona. She feels queasy when the Holocaust is mentioned, and throws up on one occasion when offered the part of Anne Frank. Nothing more. The knowledge that her father has been an accomplice to mass murder has not, so far as we can see, interfered with her cheerful progress through life or...