8. Patrick White’s The Aunt’s Story: Collapsing Identity in an Avatar of the Age

The Aunt's Story, by Patrick White, 1948. Eyre and Spottiswoode. Pictured, Penguin paperback, 1985.

Patrick White’s third novel was one of his own perpetual favourites, little noticed at the time but eventually viewed as a cornerstone of his early career. White, Australian literature’s first, and so far only, Nobel laureate, is an intimidating figure to many contemporary readers, and not without reason. His glutinous prose style can be off-putting, with his firm resistance to the minimalism of language normally associated with modernism, even whilst delving into some of modernism’s key concerns, matters of perspective and conceiving the world. He also often wrote about an haute-bourgeois, Eurocentric sector of Australian society that’s much less defined today.

As both a reading experience and an artistic statement, The Aunt’s Story is both impressive and sticky. Slow, intense, often hallucinogenic in its perceptual intricacy, and yet as distant from immediate reality as its half-mad heroine, The Aunt’s Story is, as a feat of technical writing, quite amazing. Time and time again, White conjures sentences that paint in perfervid tones an imagination that perceives experience in an off-kilter, hyper-vivid style, shading into vague dissociation and then true madness.

The aunt in question is Theodora Goodman, the kind of human – a spinster, unattractive, too individual for her world and too distracted for meditation – easily ignored by life. And she is not, in her fashion, entirely pitiable. Her self-contained, sphinx-like quality, which tantalises and taunts, conceals a boundless and formless character, as Theodora intimates a descent into nihilism, a sense of inherent murder, of “the great millennium of dissolution”, contained within her psyche. Editing herself out of the real world, and into those lives she chooses, Theodora in her crazed way embodies a disintegrating world. Like a virgin priestess to some unseen deity, she holds herself in readiness, meditating on a too intensely charged connection to the nature of the earth and life. Or is she just an old dingbat?

The novel proceeds in three parts: “Meroë”, “Jardin Exotique”, and “Holstius”. It opens just after the death of Theodora’s mother. Once the mistress of a large and impressive colonial homestead, Meroë, on a grazing property that her feckless intellectual husband had allowed to go to seed, Mrs Goodman had finished up living in a Sydney house with the less beloved of her two daughters, the ill-shaped Theodora, despite a subtle strain of mutually homicidal resentment that lived between them. Theodora’s conventionally pretty and humdrum sister, Fanny, had received all the grace and favour of their mother, which helped her lasso an equally humdrum, good-looking neighbour, Frank Parrott, who was initially as intrigued by the tomboyish, knowing Theodora. Even from an early age, Theodora, wilful in her lethal desire to know everything, seems linked in a strange, morbid fashion to the world around the genteel Meroë, akin to its bone-like stony outcrops and seeing some ghost of her own soul in the hawks, one of which she shoots down to impress Frank, but perceives only her own self-annihilating streak in the act. She also senses a bond with an aging tramp, seemingly an old friend of her father’s, who comes to beg a meal, and accounts bitterly about how her father had once been a wanderer like him. Her father died:

‘She walked out through passages, through the sleep of other people. She was thin as grey light, as if she had just died. She would not wake others. It was still too terrible, too private an experience. As if she were to go into the room and say: Mother, I am dead, I am dead, Meroë has crumbled. So she went outside where the grey light was as thin as water and Meroë had, in fact, dissolved. Cocks were crowing the legend of the day, but only the legend. Meroë was grey water, grey ash. Then Theodora Goodman cried.’

And Mrs Goodman and her daughter left Meroë for the city, where Theodora sustained a long platonic friendship, underscored both by fascination and loathing, with a successful aging lawyer, Huntly Clarkson, with the potential for marriage that never quite entices either of them quite enough. Finally, by the time Mrs Goodman dies, Theodora is pushing forty, healthy but turned ugly, twisted up as much by internal confusion as by genetic lot, sporting a faint moustache that her sister’s children love touching. Theodora takes her chief refuge in playing the role of aunt to her nephews and especially her niece, Lou, to whom she feels kinship as the kind of girl just a little too intelligent and outside of things to make Fanny comfortable. Nonetheless, her mother’s death frees Theodora to take advantage of her inheritance and embark on a trip to Europe, where White throws her in the path of the spiritual calamity of the late ‘30s.

Theodora’s final descent into schizoid madness reflects a disintegrating culture. As Kerryn Goldsworthy noted, Theodora’s crack-up mirrors the world’s, which is breaking up, achieving a state of flux, the same state to which Theodora moves, not through religious learning but through spiritual instinct. In the novel’s second episode, Theodora, and the narrative, dips in and out of immediate reality, as Theodora immerses herself in the stories other guests in the same coastal hotel tell her, especially those of an old Russian soldier, Alyosha Sokolnikov, who calls himself a general, but later admits to only ever having risen to the rank of major. Sokolnikov calls Theodora Ludmilla, projecting onto her the likeness of his long dead sister, who was murdered by revolutionaries. Another guest, Mrs Rapallo, an American heiress, with whom Sokolnikov has a running but not deeply serious quarrel, later admits that a daughter that she has told her of, who supposedly married a rich aristocrat, doesn’t exist, an invention to make her own experience amongst the grandees of Europe more coherent and purposeful. Thusly, Theodora finds herself as a person with limited capacity to discern reality amongst many folk who maintain fictions to make their lives bearable.

Theodora embodies, firstly, a schism, that between social role and private persona. If a key modernist concern was the question of perspective and how it affects the world – and how prose presents that world – Theodora perceives existence hazily, through a filter of private fantasy and estrangement. Though seemingly innate, Theodora’s estrangement is surely enforced by her inability to adopt a shape pleasing to the world, in any form. She accepts the cliché of maiden aunt without demure, even with a touch of ironic pride, because it’s an identity that at least keeps her momentarily rooted to the structure of things, whilst also liberating her; it has no attendant ties, no solid part to play in other people’s lives, save the ethereal designation “aunt” to her sister’s children, or more specifically to Lou, that is a kind of spiritual, once-removed mother, the kind who sees into a soul without blinkers of expectation. It also prevents her from having to define herself in relation to the forces that work upon her, which finally becomes her crisis.

Other guests in the Hôtel include Katina Pavlou, a teenaged girl to whom Theodora becomes another kind of aunt; Wetherby, an English writer; and his German lover, Lieselotte, a Countess and painter who ran away from her crazed, Fascist husband, and is now possessed herself with a deeply nihilistic intent. Wetherby and Katina begin a flirtation which Theodora casually aids, hazily perceiving in their trip together to an old Napoleonic tower as the event for Katina’s loss of virginity. This precipitates Lieselotte’s final auto-da-fe, in which she murders Wetherby and sets fire to the hotel:

‘She was alone now, in the passage of the hotel, of which wall-paper rejected a long imposed flatness. Walls whipped. All the violence of fire was contained in the hotel. It tossed, whether hatefully of joyfully, it tossed restraint to smoke. Theodora ran, breathing the joy or hatred of the fire. She was not certain where. She heard the desperate cockroach pop under foot. Her own report, she supposed, would not be so round or, authorities said, so final.’

The fire, of course, is percipient of oncoming war, and Theodora, now completely untethered from secure reality, heads to the United States, where she gets off a cross-country train and wanders about a small Midwestern town and its outskirts, is briefly taken in by a poor but kindly family, the Johnsons, before setting up home in an abandoned house that merges with Meroe in her mind, and she is revisited by the wanderer, who now calls himself Holstius and encourages Theodora to accept her imminent incarceration and divided self with acquiescence. Theodora is indeed soon collected by a doctor called by the Johnsons.

Theodora spans gulfs: new and old worlds, male and female, sane and insane, civilisation and nihilism, mystic and cynic. If the ideal of shamanism is something beyond male and female, a figure like Tiresias who can shift between the two and remain outside the normal slipstreams of time and identity, Theodora is something similar. She is, at last, everything and nothing. Carolyn Bliss suggested that Theodora, like another White hero, Voss, lurches in a great nothingness precisely because of this mix of solipsism and self-ignorance. Theodora’s meditative nature skips around her own nature, constantly critiquing everything else, imagining herself in other modes, other identities, trying on and casting away the rags of fraying world. She’s happiest drifting far beyond that structure, trying on other lives for size once she finally reaches that great outer world and finds, chiefly, endless reflections of her own mind. Once she is divested of her last true worldly responsibility, her mother, she goes out to meet the world; only when she is divested of her sanity can she begin to comprehend herself.

The France she encounters in the Hôtel du Midi is anachronistic, and the source of my unease about this segment: it feels walled up against the outside world, full of cultural refugees living in a distended belle époque that has precious little to do with France of the ‘30s, with Mrs Rapallo trailing associations of Henry James and John Singer Sargent, and Sokolnikov, straight out of Dostoyevsky and Chekhov, and the rest, all of whom reflect the fractured state of pre-War Europe. But then again, Theodora’s distorted imagination seems to repaint everything in a new shade, and the Hôtel and its denizens could be as much her imagination as fact. Either way, it’s reminiscent of the Davos sanatorium in Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, a similar abode of émigrés unknowingly awaiting a cataclysmic, with a seeker-hero keeping the focus. Theodora’s fantasias draw her off into lives that she might as well have lived – her particular identification with Sokolnikov’s legendary sister, which seems to sit well with her own mother’s foreign, possibly Russian background, the most potent of her variety of potential lives.

Who then is Theodora? Or, who is she not? With her masculine traits and father’s favourite status, she suggests the defeated tomboy, the crushed spirit of a sensualism not flowing through the familiar channels, to the point where her capacity to sense is both out of all proportion and yet strangely dead, an identity strangled in its cradle by a code of civility losing all purpose. Theodora’s youthful communion with the colonial landscape has remade her into something that cannot yet, at least not in her mother’s eyes, live; only after the old world immolates itself will it find a form.

Theodora perceives evil in herself, and her mother, hateful as she is, perceives a criminal solipsism, which finally is given free reign once her mother dies. Theodora’s association with weapons and death, her mastery of shooting and habit of walking off with knives and deep, preternatural identification with murderers, imbues her with the character, if not the actuality, of an angel of death. She carries a negativity within her that matches the age, one of war, declining presumptions of gentility (seen in general scope in the Hôtel du Midi, with its collective of runaways from revolutions and the “myth in jackboots”. She kills the little hawk, the spirit of wildness that reigns over the landscape at Meroë, the emblem of a brief and ferocious existence, thus annihilating her own self-realisation on that stage; she denies her own desire for a spectacle (also annihilating her sister’s love for her, who recognises she’s mad, and the glimmering interest Frank had in her). She’s a seeker, a searcher, and yet she’s not an aspirational explorer. Her father, fan of The Odyssey, charts Homeric enterprises, but, as for Odysseus, Theodora splits into the many-headed Scylla, looking quite the gorgon to the eyes of men. She escapes deterioration into utter mediocrity, such as inevitably grips her conventionally pretty sister and her conventionally masculine husband, who simply fulfil a biological function and instantly petrify.

Theodora’s desire to know takes on the morbid intensity D. H. Lawrence diagnosed in an Edgar Allan Poe tale like ‘Morella’, a need to know the world and people down to the bones, down to a basic nature, whilst simultaneously erasing herself, disposing of that “great monster Self”. The broader influence of Lawrence, who, some critics like Carolyn Bliss note, was an influence on White’s early fiction, can be detected in the symbolism of Meroë and the crucial avatars Theodora, product of a contorting, dying genteel civilisation, discovers instead in earth and animals; the closest kin she finds from the world of men is a Greek musician, Moraïtis, to whom she is introduced in Sydney, and whose music penetrates her deeply. He was a peasant from the ancient pagan cradle of civilisation, a trailblazer for her own search for some knowledge and experience of substance.

But Theodora never truly penetrates the nature of neither the world nor herself, peeling the skin off the onion, until only nothingness is left. Bliss called her a Faust, the first Faust of White’s career of Fausts, offering her soul for knowledge and gaining only chaos and dissolute purpose. Theodora encounters her nihilistic, destructive side in the German artist Lieselotte, prognosticating an inferno that bursts out and consumes this European conclave, and leaves Theodora stranded to at last reckon with her own shattered self, just as modern culture, after that millennium of dissolution, will pick up its pieces. As Lieselotte predicts, ‘We have destroyed much, but we have not destroyed enough. We must destroy everything, everything, even ourselves. Then at last when there is nothing, perhaps we shall live.” As Lieselotte is driven to annihilate her lover, the poet, musician, and teacher Wetherby, that is a fount of creation, so to does Theodora pursue her annihilating programme right to its bitter end.

White shows off his brilliance constantly - a bit too much so. Like the Jardin Exotique of the Hôtel du Midi which gives the second part of the novel its name, White’s prose is tangled and exotic, but also somehow fossilised, immobilising. Meanwhile his narrative is compassionate, visionary, deeply conceived, but also often distended, alienating, and, truth be told, as interminable as often as it is hypnotic. Most truly great works of literature can be as difficult as hell and yet graceful, a gift White hadn’t quite achieved by this point. The Aunt’s Story is often ponderous and showy in its poetic affectations. Because the viewpoint is so intimately tied to Theodora’s skewed, occasionally unintelligible sense of reality, the "Jardin Exotique" isn’t deeply persuasive or terrifying in the attempt to paint a crumbing Europe. Lieselotte, who acts out the destructive impulses Theodora harbours, is too distant to be deeply disturbing, in the same way that, say, Smerdyakov's link to Ivan is in The Brothers Karamazov: White would have achieved more power in his intent with a less circumlocutory style. Whilst White richly communicates Theodora’s mindscape, his thematic imperatives are dulled.

And yet it’s still an important and stimulating work of literature that rewards the patient reader with a darkly conjured sense of the disintegration of personality and of a cosmic need for disinfection.

See also:

Bliss, Carolyn 1986, “Patrick White’s Fiction”, MacMillan, London.

Goldsworthy, Kerryn 2000, ‘Fiction from 1900 to 1970’, in “The Cambridge Companion to Australian Literature”, ed. Elizabeth Webby, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

7. 'Tirra Lirra by the River’: Memory as Mystery

Tirra Lirra by the River, by Jessica Anderson, 1978, Macmillan Company of Australia; pictured edition Penguin paperback, 1985.

As Mister Zimmerman sang: “He not busy being born is busy dying.” And such is the essential thesis of the life Nora Porteous, the heroine of Tirra Lirra by the River, a work that provoked mixed feelings in me. It is an archetypal example of a ‘70s Australian “slim volume” novel: 141 pages long, laced with then-fashionable concerns, chiefly feminism and the cultural cringe, it captured the 1978 Miles Franklin Award, and it’s exactly the sort of stucco-crusted work that prize delights in. The narrative takes the structure of an aging woman’s assessment of her less-than-satisfied life, and expresses often urgent and telling emotions in a prose style that is occasionally witty and yet, for the most part, pedantic and lacking any formal grace, the kind of poeticism that could give it the weightless quality of reverie it requires. You can practically smell the green tea and potpourri wafting off the page. Heroine Nora is supposed to be a likeably flawed, but finally, heroically self-possessed woman who manages to reinvent herself against impossible odds, but it's possible to argue that, more often than not, she's the type of unfortunate personality who successfully blames everyone else for the traps she puts herself in.

Nora is a child of a Queensland town, to which she returns after nearly a half-century’s absence to find has been annexed by suburbs. She had left it first for Sydney, where she lived with her former husband, Colin Porteous, and then in London, where she forged a career as a dressmaker and theatrical costumer. When she returns to Australia after a series of calamities ends the comfortable retired life she had been leading with two female friends and the man who was their landlord, she’s laid flat by a case of pneumonia for weeks and sorts through her mass of barely examined recollections, fancies, deliberate elisions and half-formed prejudices that have defined her life, in relation to her sister, Grace, whose death left Nora with the family house again, to her ex-husband, to two old childhood acquaintances, successful author Olive Partridge, and Dorothy Ivey, who married a man named Rainbow and had a son, Gordon, who is now Nora’s wan, distant attending doctor. His phlegmatic manner evokes a mystery for Nora over Dorothy’s end which, when Nora learns of it, proves far stranger than anything Nora could have expected.

As a detailed portrayal of shifting cultures and psychological acuity, Tirra Lirra isn’t deeply moving, because Nora’s perspective on other people is so disengaged, and the mysteries of her personality not all that terribly interesting. The core memory she dredges up of an incident when she was a teenager with a younger boy, Jack Cust, which seems to have caused her retreat from passion, isn’t exactly a riveting revelation, and the climactic discovery that Dorothy slaughtered her family except for young Gordon strangely lacks menace and horror, and proves, truth be told, to be just another wellwhaddayaknow in Nora’s life. The novel reads partly like listening to a long ramble on an airplane flight by the lady in the next seat. Compared to the vibrant psycho-sexual tension and indiscernibly confused mysticism and madness Patrick White evoked in his similar The Aunt’s Story, Anderson’s writing is only prosaic and passable.

It is as a piece of rumination that the novel gains a depth beyond the humdrum. It suggests that life is finally being little more than the accumulation of memories that prove it occurred, as Nora’s journey of reverie reveals. Nora has no children, so it is the momentary proofs of her life that signal its substance to her. Proof comes in objects, photographs. The father she never knew, smiling impersonally in ancient pictures. Brothers and once-were-loved-ones beaming in pristine remoteness. In the house, in the totems of a long-discarded existence. Objects confirm the past, but only memories explain the past, and memory can be tricky. Nora’s self-study pivots around the events of her past, and yet her memories are slow, even unwilling, to resolve. And without the willingness of memory, no object is itself a proof of anything.

Of course Tirra Lirra tells a temporal narrative, of a woman who has lived long, poised in a perpetual state of becoming. Death is of course the easier choice. Easier by far to cry one’s heart out to the last like the Lady of Shalott than to build Camelot (Nora maintains an attachment to Tennysonian imagery, and an of course unfulfilled vision of a perfect Lancelot, from childhood). Nora presumes that Dorothy chose death as Nora almost chose death, but in fact they were Janus faces conjoined to the same annihilating impulse.

Nora’s life encompasses several familiar Aussie mythologies, not the old ones of Clancy of the Overflow, but more contemporary varieties: the creative soul who has to fly overseas to find fulfilment. The hopeless dreamer hemmed in by dull-witted suburbs. The lively female corralled by an empty male. Very ‘70s. No, wait, very now. How many women do I know in their mid-’30s who have run screaming from paltry marriages? But I digress. Nora attempts to assert a measure of control over her life, and yet discovers in the end that possibly she cheated herself of becoming something else, something more interesting. Like too many people, she is an accumulation of mistakes, and not necessarily the best judge of herself.

For Nora is a bundle of contradictions. Dissociated and ardent, tortured and blithe, talented and mediocre, self-destructive and self-actualising, unforgiving and compassionate, highly resolute and utterly malleable, she does a good job to survive as long as she does. She almost doesn’t, but she does. Nor does she go crazy from some unexamined anxiety like Dorothy. The twinning threat – self-annihilation or extermination of others – looms darkly in both her immediate life and the world about her, in the strange and yet coherent accord of her depression over her fading looks and the horrors of concentration camps, establishing the depressive’s sensibility that entwines all ills into a single mass, but also the artist’s sensibility, the poet’s sense of everything being connected – in what way do the terrors of the age reveal themselves in the individual life? Was Dorothy’s rampage only her own, or an explosion of frustration and horror keen to a generation like her? Is Nora alone in her plight, or a representative?

In this regard the novel is deadly accurate: the tight-fisted matriarchs, bowling club conspiracies, nervous homosexual bohemians and churchy suburban compost-tossers plainly evoke the seamy tedium of pre-‘60s Australia. Nora retains a distance from all this and her own life, great swathes of which pass by in dissociation and wilful passivity, and yet this doesn’t entirely conceal the lack of sense in Nora’s marrying a ponderous assassin of the soul like Colin: it feels more like a conceit to essay a theme. Like Theodora, Nora finally pursues the dream of Europe, only to find that dream cracking up; like her, she finishes up dreadfully sick and yet her physical confinement enables a final reckoning with her own nature. Nora’s sister Grace tries to have faith: she defines, both for herself and for Nora, faith as immobility, the definition of lethargy and non-becoming: death, in fact. Her novelist friend Olive suggests Aussie Protestants instead lapse into a kind of pantheism. Nora claims not to know what that is, but she does, in the sustenance she gains from the rivers and waters of her home, to which she returns, and yet cannot finally rediscover when she goes to search for the river in her now built-up suburb. Grace finally concluded rather that she had opinions rather than faith, and took up another faith – that indeed of the earth, fastidiously feeding her garden with compost, producing a gorgeous green glow and a proof of faith that Nora can’t quite submit to but still takes comfort in.

Nora too has faith, of a different, more immediate variety: faith in getting the hell of out sad and sickly little places. Like Grace, however, her conclusion is troubled by the sense that she missed something. In the act of running, much of the passing landscape is blurred. Nora, in waiting for life, refuses to live, in a crucial sense. She aborts her child and has a facelift, and both surgeries are crucifying disasters that rebound: her efforts to hold time at bay only confirm its force, and she is left old and powerless. The illness that afflicts her on homecoming seems as much the manifestation of an exhausted spirit, which has to be worked through before she can face her waning days with simplicity, as Nora looks at the mystery of herself and those people in her life.

The ultimate destination of Tirra Lirra, and its redeeming grace, is such meditation on memory, and how it constructs a person for their own understanding. Nora’s memories do not flow readily, and therefore her stock-take of her life gains an elusive, eliding uncertainty. Nora conceives herself as a mystery, which she attempts to solve in delving into the past, turning up lost fragments, like her forgotten physical flirtation with Arch Cust, that have the potential to upend her understanding of the past. The chains of her memories are built around severance, conclusions, to long patterns of existence that are vague in their being settled, and it is in that vagueness that Nora finds ambiguity, the kind that taunts and corrodes the settled opinion, the established prejudice, the assumed necessity. Nora’s certainty in what she doesn’t like, and her determination to escape it, reveals a final uncertainty of just what she wanted. Nearing the end of her days, Nora has no more experience to gain, but she does find a true second chance in her homecoming, a chance to delve into the nature of things, and discern their essence. Finally, Anderson suggests through Nora’s story, the time has come for Australians to stop either running in hysteria or settling into lethargy, but to settle and recompose their natures.

6. Randolph Stow’s Tourmaline: Ambiguous Parable

Tourmaline, by Randolph Stow, 1963, Macdonald and Co.

What is Tourmaline?

A Great Australian novel? A myth? A parable? Mystery? Obscure tome? Pie in the sky? All of the above?

What is rare about it is that is no single thing.

Its preoccupations seem to contradict the possibly atheistic, surely pagan, almost nihilistic, strand in so many of our poets and writers. But I’m not so convinced. Tourmaline is about the need for Gods, the love of wonder, the water of hope. If no God shows up, humans will invent one. A man might call himself one.

In more concrete terms, Tourmaline was the third novel of Randolph Stow, who had won the Miles Franklin Award with his previous work, To The Islands. Tourmaline itself made a far more ambivalent impact upon Australian letters when it was published in 1963, generally dismissed by many critics with their grounding in and insistence upon social(ist) realism, for Tourmaline is nakedly allusive and spiritual in its method and intent. And yet it’s no failure as a depiction of small town life; its reported dialogue is quite often precise and flavoursome, and its characters burn with the lightning solidity of impressionist figures. Stow was (and is: he’s still kicking, now 74) also a poet and his prose bears it out, his sentences pruned but beautiful, his visions essayed in cunningly elusive terms. The novel’s themes, entwining grim visions of environmental decay and the collapse of spiritual bastions, have only proven all the more vividly prognosticative and relevant.

Tourmaline is a town on the outermost fringe of the habitable world, an outpost in the advancing dead heart of Australia. Once a prosperous, even beautiful town during a gold mining boom, its lack of a steady water supply in an age of corroding drought, plus the waning value of the town’s gold compared to the cost and difficulty of extracting it, has seen the place reduced to the closest thing to a ghost town. The oldest white resident calls himself The Law, for he is their sole police officer, and he narrates the tale. He recalls a town of gardens, fecundity, and hope. He is the law, yes, and the lore, the ledger-keeper, the rememberer, the story-teller. Other figures in town include Kestrel, the publican, a taciturn marauder and petty potentate, whose cousin, Byrne, is the town’s drunken troubadour, and Kestrel’s favourite victim. Kestrel is shacked up with Deborah, a half-caste girl, daughter to an aboriginal prostitute Kestrel himself had once frequented. But Deborah was raised by shopkeepers Tom and Mary Spring, before gravitating towards Kestrel as the lone figure of potency in the town. An encampment of Aboriginals live nearby, keeping their own contract with the bitter earth.

One day the town’s supply-carting truck pulls into town with a find: a sun-charred lump of man the driver found on the roadside. At first they think he’ll die, but he slowly recovers in Mary’s ministrations, and calls himself Michael Random, revealing that he’s a diviner. Byrne is besotted with this emissary of mystery, Kestrel alarmed and distrustful, Deborah fascinated in spite of herself, whilst Tom Spring prods him in a barely-spoken metaphysical argument. Random lost his divining rod in the desert, and with it, he says, his virtue, but he also thinks that God has spoken to him, and that his having been saved and brought to Tourmaline has signalled God’s design for him, to bring life back to the shattered town. And the residents, especially The Law himself, desperately anticipate his discovery of water. But Random delays, turning up instead a reef of gold, and setting about prodding the townsfolk into returning the town’s church. But rather than instituting a spiritual revival, Random achieves more a kind of cult with himself as the messenger and deliverer.

Levi-Strauss would surely have understood Stow’s conjuring, in a novel that becomes in essence a study in comparative religion, tracing likenesses in Christianity and Aboriginal spiritualism and Buddhism and Taoism, threatening to boil them all down to a constitute singularity, a yearning for the infinite. For the water the town so desperately needs to revive is likened to spiritual fulfilment, to hope, in fact. But Random does not simply offer up water. He gives the town gold first. Of course we all know those fairy tales where princesses get gruesome comeuppances for snatching at gold whilst serving maids take up the water and gain all they desire. But is Stow’s point really that simple? Well, yes, to a certain extent. And yet it’s not exactly the shadow of greed Random uncovers, for he wants to give it to the whole town of Tourmaline, to anyone who wants it. And yet somewhere the bite of a serpent awaits.

Is Michael Random the fallen angel, Satan? A misbegotten messiah? Or con man turned cult leader? He truly believes in his mission, but he hardly knows what it is. God spoke to him in the desert. As Kierkegaard said, you ought to be carefully about whose message you’re receiving in such moments. If Random is a Satan, he’s not the one of medieval horrors. The Satan of Milton and ‘Paradise Lost’. The egotistical rebel without a cause, searching for one. He calls himself, either way, a Diviner. In the original sense. Touched by the divine. Searching, relying on the intimations of that divinity, but without a map. Who walked into the desert to find Tourmaline or something like it, or die, finished off by the deity he’s wrestling with.

“Wild beasts are loose on the world,” the Diviner reports.

A few years before they were letting off atom bombs in the desert, raining the already stricken earth with wormwood.

Either way, Michael Random comes to Tourmaline, riddled with wounds, purified by the fires of the desert – of hell, he claims. He brings hope to Tourmaline. Hope for water, for renewal and revival. Tourmaline, a dusty shithole populated by the tested and faithful – or the most craven and gutless, those who remain when all else have fled, the white conquerors who marched in, broke the earth, stripped its riches and fled as the desert asserted its wrath and took away the water. And the remnant progeny of its ancient race, the local tribes. They cling to the broken bones of the town. The “Law”, that old man, stalking his realm with philosophical impotence, dreaming of a return to glories of the past even as he becomes aware of his own imminent mortality.

Byrne, the troubadour and victim of Tourmaline, looks like the Devil. The Devil’s own son, fatherless. The man who sings of ruination, and tempts the destroyer in Kestrel. Kestrel, who flees, only to return, with mysterious, threatening minions and machinery to aid his own divination. Or are they just men with boring machines?

The Law, testifier and memory-keeper. As old as the hills, the Elder of his particular tribe. And a canny country copper who senses something might be out of sorts, eventually. The scars that pit Random’s body tip him off.

Old Gloria, matriarch of the tribe, who keeps a tree alive purely with her pee and keeps the church when no-one comes. Not until Random forces them to, signing them to an unfulfilled contract. The church, seemingly ruined, and yet with its roof off to the stars, where The Law constantly looks for his intimations of the eternal.

Tom Spring alone openly stands against him. Tom with his religion without words, only signifiers, preaching instead of the “unity of opposites”, “of being a rock to be shaped by winds and tides”. His is a passive, observant, waiting for death. His death seals the book. The loss of the last pillar in the town? Or its lone hero, given the transcendence he clung onto? His faith resists being translated into totems, any totems, not even words (how very Protestant), especially not gold hewn from the earth, which spring Random promises The Law will flow through him – his safe – and onto the rest of Tourmaline. It seems however that the gold is a harbinger of failure, of misdirected purpose. And yet it’s the only clear sign he receives. Tourmaline, a cursed place from the start. The earliest tombstone in Tourmaline: Kenneth Macarthur, struck by lightning. From on high!

Abandon all hope ye who enter here. Michael comes to save them but loses his rod “all the virtue went out of me” – and Byrne’s replacement draws him to gold, not water. Tourmaline, and by implication civilisation, equips him with the tools of greed, not divinity.

Reversals: Byrne, who seems to be Random’s most loyal and ardent apostle and admits to loving him as other love gold or water, says he never believed in him. Kestrel, the doubter, takes his message most to heart and remakes himself as a Diviner. But what kind? Kestrel has a dark, violent heart. His reign as mystic chief in Tourmaline contains more inherent threat than Random’s.

The unity of opposites.

A Divine purpose is not necessarily friendly to humans. It tests them, burns them to the bone, decimates races of the faithless, abandons them if they remain unworthy.

Mary, adopted mother of Deborah, whom Random brands a harlot - who becomes spiritual mother to Michael. Mary the mother? and Deborah, Magdelene? Shiny-eyed and delivered. The townsfolk become his acolytes, his church, his cult, his exodus, clawing at the earth in vigorous labour at his direction. His discovery of the reef of gold promises something. But what? A token? A temptation? Either way, Michael gains his congregation, a mystic ruler.

Until the project fails. No life will return to Tourmaline, not yet. Although the landscape is altered, the rhythms are unaltered. The sun will shine and the dust push in until nothing is left.

Michael’s communication with God fails. His hotline to the spirit world has become a party line, giving all sorts of garbled truth. Was he ever blessed in the first place? Did God really betray him? or was it Yahweh’s practical joke? That Michael had a gift is practically certain. He found the gold after all. Riches of the world, but not its life-source. Not the tool of renewal.

Even Moses wasn’t let into the promised land when he disobeyed the Lord’s precise instructions about just how to tap that stone to let forth the water to feed his flock.

“Some nut who thought he was Moses or something,” Kestrel says.

“Not Moses,” Byrne said. “Lucifer…He thought Christ was Lucifer too. Trying to make good and go home.” A Satan who constantly mistakes his lord’s power for his own? For Random’s final sin is more one of pride, of trying to force the folk of Tourmaline, no matter how hesitant or privately governed, into signing on for his kingdom of heaven. The villain as saviour. “The conviction came into my policeman’s head,’ The Law asserts, “And never left it, that he had been, somewhere, a criminal of quite extraordinary distinction.”

Michael tries to make good. And then goes home. Back into the desert, surely to die. Or to hell. Or to Blacktown. Kestrel, meanwhile, where he once fed the townsfolk beer, will now feed them faith, a more addictive strain.

I’m reminded of a very different book of the same era: Frank Herbert’s Dune. The same imagery – the water of life, the desert congregations, the troubled and troubling messiah. Muad’dib walks into the desert to die at the end of Dune Messiah, too, to escape the grim consequence of his efforts. Tourmaline too is a science fiction novel: “The action of this novel is to be imagined as taking place in the future,” as the introductory note says. Or is not Dune but Mad Max 2? Or Peter Weir’s The Last Wave – the opposite variety of apocalypse, but still the apocalypse. We Aussies are a calamitous lot.

Whatever Tourmaline’s philosophical vagaries and metaphysical obscurities, which will strike anyone not of the religious persuasion as only theoretically interesting, the novel nonetheless possesses a dark, bristling, intangible kind of power that’s virtually one of kind in our literature, and a genuine intellectual curiosity in the pan-cultural conceptualisation of faith and of sin. Dashes of the Melville of Moby-Dick and The Confidence Man face off The Magic Mountain and Goethe in a post-apocalyptic war-zone. I loved it.