Master
of Lunacy
Rosemary
Sorensen
Rodney
Hall
Love Without Hope
Picador, $22.95 pb, 270 pp, 0330422888
A conversation
about an anachronism led Rodney Hall to this new novel, Love
without Hope. He acknowledges his wife as the person who informed
him that until the 1980s there was a Department of Lunacy in New
South Wales, with an asylum superintendent titled the Master of
Lunacy.
Just as a new attitude towards madness is about to usher in changes
in mental health care, Lorna Shoddy is caught in a net of petty
greed and banal wickedness. Depressed and apparently alone, she
is deemed incapable of looking after herself, her horse-breeding
property is about to be sold from under her, and her destiny as
a lunatic is sealed by people content to turn their faces towards
the ‘development’ future of their country town, and
away from probity and compassion. Finding herself in the care
of the Master of Lunacy, all Lorna can hope for – and it
is a hope which appears phantom – is that her long-lost love,
Martin Shoddy, will come back in time to right the wrong of her
incarceration, and to return her to her land.
Hall appears to be interested in the ordinary madness of people
caught in their own anachronisms. His novel Just Relations,
which won the Miles Franklin Award in 1982, was the tragicomic
story of the inbred and inward-looking people of Whitey’s
Fall, who hide a huge gold deposit in order to stave off the ‘progress’
that its discovery would initiate. Swinging wildly between caricature
and deeply subtle portraiture, Hall’s method there, as in
the new novel, seems to repulse readerly sympathy for his characters,
keeping identification at bay. Even a young woman who returns
to Whitey’s Fall to take up her place within the procession
of eccentric characters only becomes the centre of focus for as
long as it takes her to become interesting and to raise our expectations
that she will be an agent of positive change. Lorna is more centrally
placed in Love without Hope, but even here she is regularly sidelined
within the narrative as our attention is drawn to other characters
in the mosaic of the plot: a mousey woman with a violent husband;
two of the nurses at the asylum, one a brutally narcissistic man,
the other an empatheic female; the town’s desperately selfish
nurse; and Archie, its doctor, a shambolic but principled alcoholic.
Lorna may be the oddball queen of this particular Hallesque pageant,
but she is often upstaged by the grotesquerie of other players
in the parade.
The theme of the pageant is love, which looms large as a subject
for this writer’s investigation, as he makes clear with titles
such as this, and his previous novel, The Last Love Story
(2004). It is not love and romance, but love as the ephemeral
gathering of human desire; love as an excuse to avoid confrontation
with what is too grand and terrifying for our understanding. We
may come close to feeling our sympathy spill over into love for
characters such as Lorna Shoddy and others (the doctor, for example,
who is central to an astounding scene); but this is not writing
– or a writer – that gives in to the siren song, and
the reader must also be strapped to the mast. Lorna is a little
creature whose predicament is pathetic, and we are on her side,
but she is to be symbolically sacrificed on the pyre created for
the funeral of hope.
After a wobbly incursion into the future with his apocalyptic
The Last Love Story, set in a terrible Brisbane-like city,
Hall has returned in to a version of his New South Wales country
town, Yandilli, as if his Yandilli Trilogy (The Second Bridegroom
[1991], The Grisly Wife [1993], Captivity Captive
[1998]), super-titled ‘A dream more luminous than love’,
has developed a fourth rider: this slim novel, set in 1982, with
Lorna as the last surviving relative of the bedraggled escaped
convict who narrates The Second Bridegroom. It may well
be that the odd couple in The Last Love Story, which Hall
called ‘a fairy-tale of the day after tomorrow’, are
projections of Lorna and her phantom-husband Martin, but there
is something in the style of that novel – a stiffness tending
towards gawkiness – that is alien to the trilogy and the
earlier Just Relations. While there is a bit of clanking
as the plot changes gears in Love without Hope, its underlying
musical themes are Yandilli-like. It is Hall back home, where
he can be as flamboyantly idiosyncratic (and misanthropic) as
he likes, as in this passage, early in the story:
The
sky fills with spirits gathering to view the farm below, agitating
the domesticated scene with speculations and swirling in their
myriad inquisitiveness, elevated and murmurous, in the observance
of a simple closure ritual – long awaited – the flourishing
turf seen as a mere pall covering a recumbent and still-discernible
female form. This gigantic female holds them, fluttering numerous
as leaves in the forest, as a clan, crowded together and in no
hurry: other intruders have not survived, but she has. They look
down at her grass-clad form, half a kilometre long, and at the
tiny squared irrelevance of house and yards set ceremonially on
her head, at the horse trough held like a dish in her hand. They
know with the knowing of two thousand generations – a vast
and ever-tumbling avalanche of grief and laughter too cataclysmic
to be confined – there is a heart here and the heart has
not stopped beating, only half-buried by the soil and masquerading
as bare peaceful folds of hillside.
This
and other sumptuous, often thrilling passages within Love without
Hope are provocatively enigmatic. The paragraph that follows
suggests that this female presence is ‘an old woman who does
not lie quiet under the exhaustion of age. Her spirit is among
them. She is tomorrow’s havoc.’ Hall’s intertext
is vast, I suspect, and this little book is no doubt shot through
with mythological, literary, religious and philosophical references.
The sketchiness of some scenes does not always survive the weight
of the intellectual apparatus bearing down on Lorna and her trials.
Love without Hope, the Yandilli Trilogy and Just Relations
are just one group of novels in Hall’s deep oeuvre that is
less well known than, say, David Malouf’s (Hall’s almost
exact contemporary). I wonder if the reason for this is Hall’s
lack of writerly good manners. It is Malouf who is often named
as the successor to Patrick White, but Hall’s writing has
more points of comparison with White’s. Malouf’s lovely,
polite style doesn’t display the bad-mannered, corrosive
energy that marks passages in the work of both White and Hall.
Perhaps, like White, Hall has suffered from neglect by an increasingly
impatient readership. Both writers use words with such head-butting
conviction that the reader can finish a sentence exhausted by
the physicality of the prose.
But Hall’s novelistic project differs from White’s in
that he is not so interested in story, although Love without
Hope is pared down to a storyline that is almost too lean.
Just Relations, with its fabulous setting and carnival
of characters, is untidy, constantly thrusting out in tangents
which then burrow the narrative down into fissures. In that book,
what appears to be his central love story surges, then falls back
into a fissure, then atrophies and is tidied up at the end in
what might be described as a disinterested way. Love without
Hope, despite its leanness, also surges into tangents and,
because it is so much shorter and linear in the plot development,
this gives it a bric-a-brac quality, econom-ical to the point
of sketchiness. Several scenes in the asylum, before and after
Lorna makes her escape, introduce us to characters whose presence
in the story is hard to fathom.
Hall’s novels, like White’s, are uncompromisingly unconsoling.
The bleakness of love illuminates not just this new novel but
much of the Yandilli books and Just Relations. Maybe, looking
at it from a sharp angle, you could say Love without Hope
leaves us imagining that there may be a little after all –
hope that is, if not love. But Hall paints a grim picture of a
vicious society where the dream of love is a weakness exploited
by the cruel. If the end of Just Relations rates as one
of the most pessimistic and devastating of all time (where the
ghostly remnant of Sebastian, father to a child with his sister,
leaves us with the thought that all the riches of the world could
not buy ‘a better society’ than this wreck that is Whitey’s
Fall), the conclusion of Love without Hope explodes with
a literal devastation, noisily taking us right to the brink of
the chasm and inviting us to peer in. What we see will depend
on how much hope we have invested in Lorna’s story, but only
an optimist bordering on naïveté will see anything
but darkness.
Love without Hope is certainly entertaining, and perhaps
one of the most accessible of Hall’s novels, in that the
plot is neatly defined by the simple question as to whether Lorna
will escape the asylum and return home to claim her farm. It is
like Captivity Captive in that respect, where the plot
was defined by an equally simple question: who killed the three
siblings? The ingenious answer to that question provided satisfyingly
rich closure for the reader; it was an ugly conclusion, suggesting
that the colonial adventure was a recipe for perversion that poisoned
love and lives, but it could also function as a crime novel, providing
moral escapism (the murder explained, the evil contained). Hall
doesn’t allow us, at the end of Love without Hope,
to sit back with a sigh of contentment that, however wicked the
baddies have been, they’ll get their comeuppance and the
goodies will be avenged. While the perversions of the custodians
at the lunatic asylum may, our storyteller hints, receive just
desserts, and those who steal land to destroy it may (or may not)
find themselves stymied, that big vengeful heart beneath the soil
does not, it seems, discriminate between the kinds of madness
embodied by those who swarm above it. We are all, we wannabe lovers,
doomed to live without hope.
Rosemary
Sorensen is a Brisbane-based arts journalist and a former Editor
of Australian Book Review.
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