Graeme Kinross-Smith, Long Afternoon of the World and Stephen Scourfield, Other Country

I really should hate Long Afternoon of the World. A story told in fragments and waves by a self-obsessed middle-class man worried that his life and identity are falling apart; a story that repeats itself, hurls echoes about and literally turns in circles without giving us much plot at all is a standard recipe for engendering my scorn.

The book's first-person narrator, Tim Menzies, has grown up in Mont Albert in a comfortable and loving family with strong connections to the Wimmera. We meet him when he has reached a troubling stage in his life: his marriage is over, he is losing connection with his children, people around him – his “close people” – are dying and he is a writer who needs to write. And write he does, about this limited circle of people.

Indeed, Tim is happy within these limits. His focus is not beyond what he already knows. He admits that when it comes to Melbourne: “It is the city whose east I know better than its north or west.” (Incidentally, if there's a better fourteen word critique of the Australian publishing industry than the one able to be inferred here I am yet to read it!) And it this lack of outward imagining that causes the book to spiral in on itself – to a point where overwhelming grief and pathos leave an empty and inert stasis.

Yet there's something haunting and beautiful about Long Afternoon of the World. While having little in the way of substance it has plenty of affect. The development of atmosphere and the evocation of emotion are the book's core business. There are laugh-aloud moments and other times of profound sadness untainted by sentimentality.

When other books exist to narrate events, this one wants to question the very possibility of so doing. The staples of narrative fiction: chronology, cause and effect, the border between imagination and reality, the validity of memory and the idea of a dominant narrative perspective set at one particular time are all left unsettled.

Kinross-Smith uses the metaphor of the circle as his central trope. Family, time, events and lovers are all linked through circles of connection and cycles of repetition. Tim narrates, typically, “I am looking into a mystery in a bow window filled with light. Then I am standing, wondering. I am looking into my own eyes again now. I am far around time's circle.”

Even this brief passage indicates that Kinross-Smith is a technically gifted writer with great capacity to capture and stir emotion via simple elegance. I'm looking forward to the time he finds something more interesting to write about.

I really should love Stephen Scourfield's Other Country. A gritty realist story, laced with sex and violence, triumph and tragedy, about two boys who escape the family homestead and their father's brutality to make their way in the world is just my cup of tea.

The other country is the northern third of Australia. “No borders, no barriers, no passport checks, but on the way north you cross an invisible line and into this other place.” The brothers, The Ace and Wild Billy (their father couldn't be bothered giving them names so they found their own!) live and prosper there. Their innate strength ensures their success in establishing a good life for themselves despite the hurdles they encounter. The novel descends into tragedy when the culture of brutal masculinity that the brothers have escaped makes its inevitable return.

A first-time novelist, Scourfield's other career is journalism. And Other Country shows the influence of grub street. It contains some excellent descriptions of scenes and events and the author has a good eye for things beyond his ken. The journalist's nose for contemporary relevance is also at work in the book's theme about land (rights, use and management).

But Other Country is soured for me by some glitches in the writing. It is weak on the interior lives of the characters and occasional moments of purple prose left me squirming. In trying too hard to capture a vernacular not his own, Scourfield sometimes lets himself down. For example, when the boys eventually summon the courage to escape, “the V8 fishtails up the dirt track away from the homestead, and rattles the cattlegrid. They shoot through. Bolt. Do a runner. And neither looks back.” This might be OK for a dictionary of Aussie slang but none of those terms captures nearly well enough the emotional significance of the moment.

Ultimately the problem with Other Country is that it is a massive story told too quickly, sometimes too glibly. A story that deserved slow-boil epic proportions has been given short-novel shrift.