In a world of international horrors and hopes it is weird to have one of the weirdest true-life crime stories transpiring in a court in Morwell and it would hardly be surprising if this provoked the attention of Helen Garner, the most celebrated explorer of the no-man’s land between fiction and non-fiction. It would be fascinating to hear her on what Coleridge called ‘motiveless malignity’. It is weird too that one of our most notable actors Judy Davis should be playing the Helen Garner figure in a dramatisation of The Spare Room, the novel in which Garner presents herself full of anger and vexation at a friend who is afflicted with cancer (played in the stage adaptation by Elizabeth Alexander).

The Spare Room stays in the mind as the Helen Garner book where she depicts her own negativity without much in the way of mitigation so that it’s at the furthest remove from Helen Garner’s court case books which began with The First Stone (about the Ormond College Affair) and went on to Joe Cinque’s Consolation and This House of Grief, about the Farquharson trial.

I’ve always argued that Helen Garner is an unreliable narrator – and the eminent New York critic Janet Malcolm agreed with a different emphasis. Helen Garner was originally accused of having published her diaries – in Monkey Grip – and it was only years later that she admitted this was true.

This emphasis seemed contradicted by the beauty of the cadences in The Children’s Bach where a central figure was based on her friend Axel Clark and then, very differently, by Cosmo Cosmolino with its mythic structures where a figure can bring to mind the Angel Gabriel and the Mary to whom great things are done and where characters can ride aloft through the night sky.

Helen Garner has read every word of that singular diarist Pepys and she is also fascinated by the light and shadow of religious experience. Amy Witting the author of I for Isobel said Cosmo Cosmolino was quality but it made her fear for Garner.

The court case books and the essays which are contemporary with them paint a picture of Garner as someone steeped in doubt (and incapable of jumping to a conclusion however viable it might seem) and she is capable in the most disconcerting way of dramatising aspects of her own personality which are not attractive though somehow she pulls off this double perspective. And all these multi-coloured features are there in The Season, the book in which she presents herself in thrall to her grandson’s passion for AFL.

The dramatisation of The Spare Room suggests who else might play the Garner figure – someone who can burn with judgement and yet is prey to ostensibly unreasoning doubt – which paradoxically creates an apprehension of moral grandeur. Noni Hazlehurst played Nora in the 1982 film with Colin Friels – Judy Davis’s husband – as the demon lover Javo (he’s doing Lear in November) and Helen’s daughter Alice stole the film with her portrait of herself. Then in 1992 there was the Gillian Armstrong film The Last Days of Chez Nous in which Lisa Harrow – as the Garner figure – led a cast that included Bruno Ganz as the French husband who abandons her for her sister Kerry Fox. All of it based on real life drama.

And there was actual fear that Judy Davis would play the Garner figure. One actor who it would be fascinating to see in the role is Helen Morse, one of the very greatest actors Australia has produced.

On Thursday 18 September and Saturday 20 September the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra will be presenting Mozart’s Great Mass in C Minor. It is being conducted by Nicholas Carter with Siobhan Stagg and Samantha Clark as the sopranos, the tenor Matteo Desole and bass David Greco. The Mass in C minor is famous for the way it leaves parts of the liturgy unfinished but has an atmospheric of startling personal confessionalism which somehow coexists – because Mozart can do anything – with his archeological use of Handel as if the nakedly subjective could naturally consort with the appropriation of the rhetoric of musical theory. The MSO chorus conducted by Warren Trevelyan-Jones are not liable to disappoint.

The programme will also include Strauss’ Intermezzo: Träumerei am Kamin and Brahms’ Schieksalsied so that it will at some level show the depth of the romantic inheritance though it is Mozart at his grandest and most mysterious who will predominate. It is as if he is plucking parts of the Mass like so many flowers according to his deepest needs with absolutely no sense of the Mass in C minor being left incomplete.

Before this there is Simon Lamsma doing Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto on 8 August and 9, a piece that requires a virtuoso mastery that will allow the violin to sing. In the case of Brahms’ Symphony No. 2 there is the relaxation of a supreme version of pastoral.

Getting back to Helen Garner it’s interesting that the very title of The Children’s Bach suggested compositional ambition and modesty.

It’s good to see that in honour of Bloomsday – the day when James Joyce’s Ulysses is set, 16 June, 1904 – there was a production at fortyfivedownstairs of the ‘Circe’ chapter where the epic turns into a play. It sounds as if it faltered at times while having an essential vitamin but we’re right to honour Joyce. George Orwell said ‘[he felt] like a eunuch who has taken a course in voice production’ when reading Joyce. Joyce’s voices include this beautifully shaped question and answer when Stephen and Bloom are together: ‘What spectacle confronted them when they, first the host, then the guest, emerged silently, doubly dark, from obscurity by a passage from the rere of the house into the penumbra of the garden? The heaventree of stairs hung with humid nightblue fruit.’

We have been reading Ulysses for more than 100 years now and we are right to treat Bloomsday as a great feast-day in the calendar of the literature of the world. It’s likely that we’ll come to see the drama of Helen Garner’s books as a compositional thing, not reportage. Perhaps we’ll be performing The Last Days of Chez Nous and This House of Grief the way we perform stage versions of Ingmar Bergman’s films.