 Word On Books
with Jeremy Fenton
The Artist is a Thief
By Stephen Gray, Published by Allen & Unwin
 As a reader I love sophisticated literary works masquerading as thrillers-cum-tales of detection. Stephen Gray's The Artist is a Thief, the winner of last years Australian/ Vogel $20,000 literary award for best unpublished manuscript by a writer under 35 years of age, fits the description perfectly.
Margaret Thatcher Gandarrwuy is an 'internationally recognised' indigenous artist from the fictitious community of Mission Hole in the Northern Territory who is about to unveil her latest and much anticipated work.
As the curtain is literally pulled back on her painting, it's shown to be slashed, with the words 'the artist is a thief' scrawled across it.
Hence the title of the novel and the mystery that lies at its centre. There's no body in this novel, just a body of work and a question of who really created it. (Actually it's a touch ironic that a novel about artistic integrity and authorship should win the Vogel given the award's history with the Paul Radley and Helen Demidenko/Darville cases.)
Drawing on his day job as a law lecturer who specialises in the subjects of copyright law and indigenous peoples and the law, Gray's second novel jumps headlong into one of the least popularly understood areas of Australian arts - and emerges triumphantly.
Stephen Gray, with The Artist is a Thief, has succeeded as admirably in entertaining as he has in subtly raising the big and relevant questions of what constitutes art in the indigenous world, how the white world reacts to it and what we do to protect it.
Enjoyably challenging Australian literature.
Beethoven's Hair
By Russell Martin, Published by Bloomsbury Paperbacks
 In 1994 two Americans (with the unlikely but true names of Che Guevara and Ira Brilliant) purchased a lock of composer Ludwig van Beethoven's hair. Each had their differing reasons for doing so, but can probably fairly be described by Brilliant's statement that 'My interest in Beethoven is like a fire burning inside me'.
Their intention was to follow the precedent set by experiments done on a lock of Napoleon's hair in the 1970's (tests revealed that the former emperor had not been poisoned as long supposed by historians).
These kinds of books - historical tracings and recreations - are as common as rabbits these days, but Beethoven's Hair by Russell Martin really brings something special to its readers as it tracks the path of a piece of hair from his death in 1827 through to the 1990s.
The hair in question was passed down for more than a century through musician Ferdinand Hiller's (who clipped the lock shortly after the composer's death) family. In the first half of the last century it 'mysteriously found its way to a small town in Nazi-occupied Denmark during World War II - and into the hands of Kay Fremming, a doctor giving aid to literally hundreds of persecuted Jews.
In fact the hair's travels to the present day are almost as much of an enigma as the secrets of Beethoven's health that it holds.
Not that long ago any book that explored the reasons behind an historical figure's deafness, general ill-health and eventual death would have been supposition, pure and simple.
However the advent of modern sciencehas meant that the shrouds of history are fascinatingly and definitively peeled away in this case.
As the cover blurb says: Music, madness and molecular science - read it and then go listen to the man's music - preferably loudly.
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