'Rewriting the past', 8 November 2008, The Adelaide Advertiser.
Reviewed by Katherine England. |
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| THERE is currently a vogue in Australian literary fiction for hanging universal concerns on historical pegs - for novels that are not exactly historical but which start with real-life characters from the known past and build upon the often bare bones of historical record the imagined inner lives and deep human emotions that are the real and timeless passion of the particular novelist. Richard Flanagan has taken a wide sweep of history that stretches from Tasmania through London to the Arctic and connects the Aboriginal child Mathinna with Charles Dickens via Lady Jane Franklin in order to think about love and longing and the effects of longing denied. Flanagan's Lady Jane longs for a child to love, sublimates her longing in bringing culture to the Van Diemonian colonials and stuffs up the chance she is given to fulfil her heart's desire in a muddle of rigid Victorian political correctness and scientific inquiry. As the ambitious, progressive wife of John Franklin, Arctic explorer and governor of Van Diemen's Land, Lady Franklin is captivated by 7-year-old Mathinna. Suppressing her love under the mantle of science she takes Mathinna back to Hobart as an experiment in ``civilisation''. Flanagan's novel is designed to contradict the thesis, propounded by his Dickens character, that only savages give in to their passions: ``An Englishman understands his passions in order to master them and turn them to powerful effect.'' From his poignantly ironic opening and his Aboriginal Protector's creeping conviction that he is killing the people that he loves, Flanagan makes it clear that, to a modern sensibility at least, the so-called savages were a good deal more physically and emotionally enlightened than their civilised invaders. Wanting is powerfully and poetically evocative, particularly of place and character. It is often confronting, full of provocative asides and intensely imagined scenes of which the deaths of Franklin, gangrenous and stinking in his ice-crushed coffin of a ship, and ruined, discarded teenage Mathinna are the most haunting. Mathinna's treatment at the hands of white society as she sinks into degradation is detailed with painful and all too believable passion, but the apparently unsubstantiated suggestion that Franklin initiated her decline by making her play Leda to his swan while she was still a child is a little too historically specific not to cause unease in the reader. Like Wanting, Louis Nowra's new novel Ice is a tale of love and loss written in a far more documentary style and based rather more firmly on historical and biographical fact. It would not be Nowra, however, if the novel were not a little off-beat, a touch macabre - fact embroidered by a somewhat dark, refreshingly inventive imagination. An account of the life of Malcolm McEacharn, the man who pioneered refrigerated transport, brought electricity to 19th century Melbourne and almost became prime minister, nests inside a parallel story set in present-day Sydney. It is addressed to/told for McEacharn's biographer, a young woman currently in a coma, by her devastated husband - although the McEacharn story is initially so dominant that it is a dislocating shock every time the text reverts to ``you'' and brings the suddenly confused reader into the present. The men are linked by their obsession with lost loves: McEacharn's beloved Ann died suddenly 11 months into their marriage; the narrator's Beatrice is in a simulacrum of death. The book incorporates every possible aspect and connotation of ice, including the comatose Beatrice (on ice), the ice of refrigeration, the Circular Quay Ice Bar and the drug ice. It opens with the gloriously extravagant image (shades of Dick Smith's 1978 April Fool's day hoax) of a ship towing an iceberg into Sydney Harbour - an iceberg in which the naked body of a sailor is found to be interred. Later, McEacharn will retrieve the bones of his own sailor - the father who went down with his ship off King Island - and boast that he has triumphed over Time. Triumphing over time, cheating death whether by obsessively keeping the memory of their love alive, by freezing fresh meat and thawing it back to life at the end of a two-month sea journey or by making a dead man live again by telling his story is the preoccupation both of this engaging novel and of its central characters. |