The protagonist of Melbourne novelist Michael Meehan’s third book, Deception, is, like his creator, a lawyer with an intensely creative side.
“Someone once told me that I’m a lawyer and a dreamer, and that it’s an awkward mix,’ Nicholas Lethbridge informs us. “The dreamer opens gaps where no one else can see them. The lawyer goes in search of all that’s needed, to close them down again” (47). This is one of several passages in the novel reflecting on how narrative operates in law, history and fiction. Deception, with its tendency to ask expansive universalising questions in the first person plural would like to make us think about the nature of storytelling.
“But just how much, beyond the range of touch and sight, and memory, can we really hope to recover?” (96). Many readers will tire of these gnomic pronouncements, but thankfully the novel leavens its epistemological brow-furrowing with a lively historical detective story.
Nicholas, a young Australian law graduate and scholar arrives in Paris in 1968 during the student protests and strikes against the De Gaulle government. The great-grandson of Paul Duvernois, a French activist banished to Australia after the 1971 Paris commune, Nick wants to learn more of his family history. He also carries with him a mysterious set of papers that have come down to him through his grandmother. Supposedly written by Sebastian Rouvel, another communard exiled to the Antipodes, the documents bring him into contact with an erratic but beautiful young Rouvel researcher, Julia Dussol, who becomes determined to decode their secret meaning. Nicholas also gains the confidence of his three elderly French great-aunts, who gradually reveal more about their upbringing in exile in the shadow of Mount Deception, South Australia. The two young historians slowly come to understand the dark truth connecting the two French émigrés that Nick’s relatives would prefer remained unknown.
If this sounds rather involved, that’s because it is, with Meehan spending the first two thirds of the book setting up a multitude of teasing questions. Do Rouvel’s obscure Australian poems mean something or are they the work of a madman? Why did he finally ride off to die in the desert alone? What was his relationship with Nick’s great-grandmother Marie-Josephe? The denouement in the book’s final third is rather less convincingly, as though Meehan shares the “old professional habit” of his lawyer character, Monsieur Jalabert: ‘a love of neat endings, with all the pieces tied together’ (88). Nevertheless, the novel’s command of historical material is impressive, its familiar quest narrative perfectly serviceable. It’s also refreshing to read a work of Australian historical fiction that is not about settling the bush, or either of the world wars. All of these topics deserve treatment, but Meehan is to be admired for taking on an essentially European story and drawing out its little known Australian connection.
While it succeeds as a sort of high-brow thriller, Deception would also like to teach us something about history and how it is written, and it is here that things begin to go awry. At first glance the two historians, Julia and Nicholas, have a great deal in common. Both are solitary young intellectuals drawn to the study of the past out of a need for personal understanding (Julia also has a family link to the Paris commune, claiming to be Rouvel’s great-great niece), as well as professional ambition. In their understanding of history, however, they’re diametrically opposed. While Julia exhibits a swaggering confidence about her ability to read patterns in the evidence and accurately render history through “informed conjecture” (72), Nicholas is a skeptic, tending to dwell on gaps and silences that suggest the past is finally unknowable.
“Trust the mystery, Julia,” he tells his sometimes-lover sometimes-nemesis. “It keeps you closer to the truth than your coherence ever will’ (228). Given that Nick is a round character, sympathetically portrayed, and Julia a type, you might expect the novel to endorse his point of view. However, the book’s own insistence on conclusively answering all of the questions it poses, would appear to undermine its protagonist’s position.
A few stylistic tics mar this otherwise elegantly written work. Meehan has a habit of heavily flagging significant events:
“Then it was that something happened” (2) “It was then perhaps that she first saw him” (36). Neither of these empty constructions communicate anything at all and the prose would sound more assured if the reader were trusted to distinguish key events from supplementary ones, narrative kernels from satellites. Our first person narrator’s long reveries peppered with the phrase “I thought” are also off-putting. Sometimes these refer back to the 19th century, as in “I thought then of Paul, and of his years labouring in Sydney” and “I thought of how he looked for her on his return from the wharves” (161). On other occasions endlessly thoughtful Nic muses about characters and events in 1968:
“I thought about what Lucien told me” (171), “I thought of the ferment in the streets below” (206).
This is more than repetitiousness, what we have here is a problem with the management of narrative time. “Chrono-logic” is the term Seymour Chatman uses to describe narrative’s dual sense of time, the way past tense stories seems to pre-exist their own telling. In Deception our narrator is doubly removed from the story he tells, separated from it first by 100 years and a host of uncommunicative French-speaking aunties, and then by the thirty further years it apparently took him to write it all down. For this reason, Nick spends a great deal of the book remembering himself remembering things three decades earlier. Would a man looking back on his first trip to Paris from such a distance truly remember what he thought at any precise moment? Probably not, and in this repeated “I thought” we sense a faint grinding of narrative gears, the author struggling to corral all the necessary exposition of historical back story into the over-burdened mind of his protagonist.
The novel sets out to tell two stories, one of the 1870s, one of a man researching this period in the 1960s, but Meehan appears far more interested in the 19th century than the 20th. Contrast the vivid and lyrical description of South Australia in the 1880s from the novel’s opening scene with the rather perfunctory description of a protest march in 1968 that appears later:
He wrote of stones. Sebastien Rouvel. In one fragment after another he wrote of stones drawn deeply from a country of felled walls and scattered rocks. He wrote of how he walked hand in hand with another across fields of broken stones and fresh growths of crumbling rock, stooping now and then to break bright flowers from fragile stems (1-2).
As we crossed the périphérique and drew closer to the centre, the signs of unrest were increasing, with large crowds of shouting protesters carrying banners, pouring from the metros and moving along the streets spilling out across the roads (169).
In Deception history is a palimpsest in which the present is written over the past. The novel juxtaposes two historical settings in order to posit a relationship between them. But Nick’s recollections of the disorder in the streets in 1968 are too hastily sketched to provide an effective frame, indeed the riots oddly generic and repetitive, always a long way off. On page 43 we hear sirens and glass breaking, on page 121 there’s more glass breaking, and on page 177 the sound of sirens and breaking glass again. The novel is consciously playing with the figure of the clueless young intellectural here, fully aware of the irony of a man so fascinated by a 100-year-old revolution that he’s oblivious to one taking place right under his nose – but that doesn’t excuse poor editing.
Deception, then, for all its cleverness ultimately emerges as an entertainment periodically studded with insight, rather than the work of enduring wisdom it would like to be. “It is important that the telling match the happening” (35), one character sagely observes. In this sophisticated and impressively-researched work of fiction, full of fascinating happenings, we never quite feel that the telling matches up.
Deception
(2008)
Michael Meehan
Allen and Unwin
ISBN: 978-1-74175-458-2
284pp AUS $32.95
Tuesday, March 10, 2009
Monday, March 2, 2009
Tamarisk Row by Gerald Murnane
Widely studied in Australian literature departments in the late 1970s and 1980s, Gerald Murnane was touted as an important new voice in our national literature, perhaps even someone with the right highbrow credentials to one day win the country’s second Nobel prize. This early success never broadened into popular appeal or international recognition, and by the late 1990s most of his books were out of print. Recently, however, there’s been a resurgence of interest in his work. In 2008 he won two major literary awards for his service to Australian letters, and his first novel, Tamarisk Row, which had not been in shops for nearly twenty years, was reissued by Giramondo. The press like to depict the now 69-years-old Murnane as “obsessive” and “eccentric,” focusing on his unusual habits: collecting marbles, studying Hungarian (although he has never left Australia) and maintaining a vast archive of his private writing and artwork. But it is precisely this obsessive quality that gives his work its thematic unity. Included somewhere in the juvenilia section of Murnane’s archive is a 10,000 word list of “poetic topics,” composed when he was 16 or 17:
‘Really it’s just a summary of what I’ve written about in the last 50 years,’ Murnane told Ramona Koval on the Radio National book show last year. ‘Landscapes and geography, looking at things from a distance, desiring objects of love from far off.’ He is a writer, then, who returns to and inventively reexamines the same preoccupations, rather than one who constantly moves onto new material. Nobody would expect a 9/11 novel from Murnane, or a reflection on Australia’s refugee policy.
‘The things I write about tend to be private matters’ he says (Koval 1). This disinterest in topical material may be one the factors that has hampered his commercial appeal, even as it has given his work a certain timelessness. He has always been a determinedly personal writer, fixated on questions of time, memory, and the self. At times Murnane, like the Borges character Funes, seems incapable of forgetting anything at all. In a short, uncharacteristically misanthropic memoir on his school days for The Age in 2007, he wrote ‘I was taught by 31 persons, each of whom I remember clearly… a good number of them were grossly incompetent.’ In his fiction Murnane’s unerring memory serves him well.
His first novel, Tamarisk Row, is a story of a Catholic boyhood in small town Victoria in the 1940s. It begins with a typically precise image:
‘On one of the last days of December 1947, a nine-year-old boy named Clement Killeaton and his father, Augustine, look up for the first time at a calendar published by St Columban’s Missionary Society.’ (3). This calendar, which depicts the holy family on the road from Palestine to Egypt, provides both an overview of the plot – the Killeatons are forced into exile by Augustine’s gambling debts – and a condensed vision of some of the novel’s central preoccupations: families, the Catholic faith, but above all time and perception. It is at this moment that young Clement becomes explicitly aware of what Paul Eakin refers to in Storied Selves as “the extended self,” that is, the self in time, the self capable of narrating its experiences.
‘Each of the squares is a day all over the plains of northern Victoria and over the city of Basset where Clement and his parents set out’ (3). The moment when Clement and his parents flee Basset, is also the moment in the boy’s development when he gains the perceptiveness that will later allow him to retell the story.
It does not seem to have been easy for Murnane to tell it. Originally published in 1974, Tamarisk Row took ten years to complete. In the foreword to the new edition, the author discusses this process:
‘I sometimes thought about myself as dithering or as needlessly agonizing over a task that I ought to have set about long before. Today, however, I feel somewhat proud of my younger self, he who might have borrowed his way of writing from any of the authors then fashionable but who would not – could not do so’ (ix). The result is a masterpiece, indebted to Joyce, and many of the other masters of high modernism, but with a down to earth charm, and idiosyncratic voice all of its own. In this 1940s Australian Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, as in the original, form and content are perfectly matched. Memorable descriptions of horse racing canter across the page in long breathless sentences. Although the third person is used, the narrator totally inhabits the child protagonist’s point of view; the novel’s short, dreamlike chapters in the present simple tense sliding constantly between the ‘real world’ and that of Clement’s feverish imagination. Tamarisk Row’s great achievement is to plausibly recreate the lost world of a child’s consciousness, and to do so from the inside and outside simultaneously:
‘The boy buys groceries for his mother and then asks politely may he look at Mr Wallace’s aviary…Behind the wire the dense shrubs and trees are planted in the shape of landscapes from every part of Australia. Hidden among the grasslands and scrub and forests and swamps and deserts are the nests of nearly every species of Australian bird. Somewhere past the dangling black and yellow of regent honey-eaters and the elusive crimson and turquoise of paradise parrots Margaret Wallace, a girl no older than Clement, is building a bower like the satin bowerbirds” (4-5).
Imre Salusinszky, arguably Murnane’s canonical critic and the author of the only book length study of his work, argues that the author’s oeuvre as a whole can be read as an exploration of “the adventure of consciousness” (2), concerned with what is inside and what is outside the mind. Tamarisk Row is clearly interested in such questions, but it remains an accessible novel, a moving portrait of a family in distress. The relationship between Clement and his father provides a strong emotional core and ensures it never veers too far into philosophical abstraction. Although Murnane insists that he does not do melodrama: ‘I don’t write books where people shout at each other’ (Koval 3), he can be quietly devastating. Aware that his father cannot acknowledge his gambling debts in front of horse racing friends, Clement is in the habit of asking for money to buy sweets every time they come around. When Clement’s elaborate horse racing games are discovered, the depth of his obsession apparent, his father snaps ‘I’m sick to death of hearing you talk about racing as though I’d never taught you anything else’ (168). But of course it is Augustine’s own fixation on the sport, his frequent absence at track meetings, and Clement’s need for closeness with his father, that drives the lonely boy to such play in the first place.
Not the least of Tamarisk Row’s virtues is its claim to one of the greatest closing sentences in Australian writing, a stirring unpunctuated three and a half page summation of the entire novel that reads like Molly Bloom calling the trots. Here all Clement’s imaginary horses compete to win the Gold Cup and the infinitely protracted race, drawn out over the course of the nearly 300 pages, seems finally to be drawing towards its close. Will it be Lost Streamlet, Passage of North Winds, Hills of Idaho? Or will Tamarisk Row, the little known horse at the back of the pack, who in classic Aussie battler style always leaves his run until too late, storm home when its all over? You’ll need to read this classic Australian novel to find out. It is a rich and serious work of literature that deserves the attention of a new generation of readers.
Tamarisk Row
(2008)
Gerald Murnane
Giramondo
ISBN: 978-1-920882-39-6
286pp AUS $27.95
‘Really it’s just a summary of what I’ve written about in the last 50 years,’ Murnane told Ramona Koval on the Radio National book show last year. ‘Landscapes and geography, looking at things from a distance, desiring objects of love from far off.’ He is a writer, then, who returns to and inventively reexamines the same preoccupations, rather than one who constantly moves onto new material. Nobody would expect a 9/11 novel from Murnane, or a reflection on Australia’s refugee policy.
‘The things I write about tend to be private matters’ he says (Koval 1). This disinterest in topical material may be one the factors that has hampered his commercial appeal, even as it has given his work a certain timelessness. He has always been a determinedly personal writer, fixated on questions of time, memory, and the self. At times Murnane, like the Borges character Funes, seems incapable of forgetting anything at all. In a short, uncharacteristically misanthropic memoir on his school days for The Age in 2007, he wrote ‘I was taught by 31 persons, each of whom I remember clearly… a good number of them were grossly incompetent.’ In his fiction Murnane’s unerring memory serves him well.
His first novel, Tamarisk Row, is a story of a Catholic boyhood in small town Victoria in the 1940s. It begins with a typically precise image:
‘On one of the last days of December 1947, a nine-year-old boy named Clement Killeaton and his father, Augustine, look up for the first time at a calendar published by St Columban’s Missionary Society.’ (3). This calendar, which depicts the holy family on the road from Palestine to Egypt, provides both an overview of the plot – the Killeatons are forced into exile by Augustine’s gambling debts – and a condensed vision of some of the novel’s central preoccupations: families, the Catholic faith, but above all time and perception. It is at this moment that young Clement becomes explicitly aware of what Paul Eakin refers to in Storied Selves as “the extended self,” that is, the self in time, the self capable of narrating its experiences.
‘Each of the squares is a day all over the plains of northern Victoria and over the city of Basset where Clement and his parents set out’ (3). The moment when Clement and his parents flee Basset, is also the moment in the boy’s development when he gains the perceptiveness that will later allow him to retell the story.
It does not seem to have been easy for Murnane to tell it. Originally published in 1974, Tamarisk Row took ten years to complete. In the foreword to the new edition, the author discusses this process:
‘I sometimes thought about myself as dithering or as needlessly agonizing over a task that I ought to have set about long before. Today, however, I feel somewhat proud of my younger self, he who might have borrowed his way of writing from any of the authors then fashionable but who would not – could not do so’ (ix). The result is a masterpiece, indebted to Joyce, and many of the other masters of high modernism, but with a down to earth charm, and idiosyncratic voice all of its own. In this 1940s Australian Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, as in the original, form and content are perfectly matched. Memorable descriptions of horse racing canter across the page in long breathless sentences. Although the third person is used, the narrator totally inhabits the child protagonist’s point of view; the novel’s short, dreamlike chapters in the present simple tense sliding constantly between the ‘real world’ and that of Clement’s feverish imagination. Tamarisk Row’s great achievement is to plausibly recreate the lost world of a child’s consciousness, and to do so from the inside and outside simultaneously:
‘The boy buys groceries for his mother and then asks politely may he look at Mr Wallace’s aviary…Behind the wire the dense shrubs and trees are planted in the shape of landscapes from every part of Australia. Hidden among the grasslands and scrub and forests and swamps and deserts are the nests of nearly every species of Australian bird. Somewhere past the dangling black and yellow of regent honey-eaters and the elusive crimson and turquoise of paradise parrots Margaret Wallace, a girl no older than Clement, is building a bower like the satin bowerbirds” (4-5).
Imre Salusinszky, arguably Murnane’s canonical critic and the author of the only book length study of his work, argues that the author’s oeuvre as a whole can be read as an exploration of “the adventure of consciousness” (2), concerned with what is inside and what is outside the mind. Tamarisk Row is clearly interested in such questions, but it remains an accessible novel, a moving portrait of a family in distress. The relationship between Clement and his father provides a strong emotional core and ensures it never veers too far into philosophical abstraction. Although Murnane insists that he does not do melodrama: ‘I don’t write books where people shout at each other’ (Koval 3), he can be quietly devastating. Aware that his father cannot acknowledge his gambling debts in front of horse racing friends, Clement is in the habit of asking for money to buy sweets every time they come around. When Clement’s elaborate horse racing games are discovered, the depth of his obsession apparent, his father snaps ‘I’m sick to death of hearing you talk about racing as though I’d never taught you anything else’ (168). But of course it is Augustine’s own fixation on the sport, his frequent absence at track meetings, and Clement’s need for closeness with his father, that drives the lonely boy to such play in the first place.
Not the least of Tamarisk Row’s virtues is its claim to one of the greatest closing sentences in Australian writing, a stirring unpunctuated three and a half page summation of the entire novel that reads like Molly Bloom calling the trots. Here all Clement’s imaginary horses compete to win the Gold Cup and the infinitely protracted race, drawn out over the course of the nearly 300 pages, seems finally to be drawing towards its close. Will it be Lost Streamlet, Passage of North Winds, Hills of Idaho? Or will Tamarisk Row, the little known horse at the back of the pack, who in classic Aussie battler style always leaves his run until too late, storm home when its all over? You’ll need to read this classic Australian novel to find out. It is a rich and serious work of literature that deserves the attention of a new generation of readers.
Tamarisk Row
(2008)
Gerald Murnane
Giramondo
ISBN: 978-1-920882-39-6
286pp AUS $27.95
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