How a Beatles album inspired Graeme Simsion’s entertaining new book

Is there a reader out there who did not find Don Tillman endearing? The Don Tillman I mean is Graeme Simsion’s character from his first novel, The Rosie Project. That screwball comedy was a roaring success and Simsion went on to write a second, then third tale of Don and Rosie.

The first of the Rosie series made Simsion famous. Don and Rosie are such beguiling characters any reader wanted to follow their lives. There was no doubt about the exhilaration of reading that first novel. The jokes were visual and hilarious, and in some mysterious way the author’s intelligence lit every page.

And every reader wondered if the endearingly infuriating Don was perhaps autobiographical. This new book might help with inquiries. Creative Differences and Other Stories is an unusual collection of nine pieces written over the industrious Simsion’s career. Some are fiction, some written for newspapers, some commissioned, some as prize entries.

And just over half the book is a short novel, Creative Differences. It addresses two opposing ways to write a novel: detailed plotting or flying by the seat of your pants. Scott has the steel-trap mind that problem-solves and makes jokes, Emily has access to the Muses. They have been happily together for three years, creatively and in life, but trouble lands with the arrival of Piper, who wants to use both of them to let her own genius out of its cage. Then there’s Gideon, a bankrupt publisher. A short man with a large brain.

Creative Differences was commissioned by Audible Australia, and this required some research for Simsion. Obviously spoken voices would be appropriate, but he had to search for inspiration.

It was the Beatles’ White Album that became the reference point for Simsion: 30 tracks, four voices, and the creative differences that famously break up bands, he writes in his introduction. I’m afraid all this swished past me.

An idle thought crossed my mind: is Simsion’s braininess overkill? Followed by another just as idle: when does clever tip into smart-arse? Simsion’s qualities worked in the tenderly handled, emotionally thin Rosie novels, resulting in the exhilarating fun, but I want to say “hmm?” here. For my money, this would work better as audible.

The nine pieces that comprise the first half of the book are engaging. Confession in Three Parts, a story-within-a story about two generations of women doctors, is a direct O. Henry descendant, shocking and satisfying. Another, Three Encounters With the Physical, was the runner-up in The Age 2013 short-story competition. A man goes on his first marathon. He’s 51. He’s obsessive, even when his body is telling him to stop or he will die. He will not.