Deception by Michael Meehan

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