Byline: Pamela Bone

I AM glad I read Patrick White's books before I read David Marr's biography of him, because I think I now know too much about Patrick White to read his books without White's own voice intruding. I might be hearing, as I read, the child Patrick White saying to another boy, "You're only working class". Which may be absurd of me. Trust the tale, not the teller, D. H. Lawrence said. The older I get the less I am able to do that. I know nothing about Helen Demidenko, except that she is a young Australian woman who has a Ukrainian father and an Irish mother and that she has written a book narrated by a fictional young Australian woman who has a Ukrainian father and an Irish mother that has just won Australia's most prestigious literary prize, the Miles Franklin Award. I have seen Helen Demidenko interviewed on television. She looks and sounds very confident, very assertive. And why not? She is only 24 and her first book has won not only the Miles Franklin, but last year's Vogel award for young writers. The book, The Hand That Signed The Paper, has been praised as an attempt "to make us understand how ordinary human beings are able to fall into inhuman cruelty". "A book of extraordinary redemptive power" it says on the back cover. Redemptive for whom? Redemptive for men who bayoneted Jewish babies and machine-gunned hundreds of innocent people? The book is...