fiction
Carl Harrison-Ford
Brenda Walker
Poe's Cat
Viking $22.95pb, 247pp
0 670 88440 5
YEARS AGO I READ a disparaging reference to Frank Hardy's Power Without Glory as the 'best researched' Australian novel. I can't remember where. Three decades later, not just research but citation have become badges of fictional honour. Poe's Cat contains eight pages on sources and three of bibliography. But while Hardy's social realist research yielded an admittedly clumsy story so recognisable it led to a protracted criminal libel battle, Brenda Walker's latest novel seems to allow her a retreat from conventional storytelling.
Thea and Finn are cousins who, in their teens, 'practised' sex together 'so we would know what to do when we grew up'. They did this at the home of their shared grandfather, an MP who lived in the upper Blue Mountains. Some years later -- twenty years, perhaps thirty -- their grandfather recently dead, they find themselves back at his house. As chance tinged with coincidence would have it, grandfather had a passion for Edgar Allan Poe and an extensive library of critical and biographical studies of the rationalist and necromancer. While reading them, Thea becomes intrigued by Virginia, the thirteen-year-old cousin Poe married and who died of consumption a decade later. The winter was bitterly cold, the Poes were bitterly poor, and as Virginia drowned from within she was warmed by little more than her husband's coat and the family cat. Thea decides to write a book for Virginia...not quite about her, not quite by her.
The impetus comes in particular from an observation in Marie Bonaparte's psychoanalytic study: in order for Poe to write, a woman first has to die. In giving Virginia a voice and a presence, Thea allows her to tell tales with intimations of passion in which the women do not have to die. This presumably ties in with Walker's rather cryptic observation (The Australian 26-27 June) that she is interested in 'narrative complicity in women's death'.
Nor does the Walker-Thea tie-in end there. In a novel with many narrative planes -- with dreams; with tales within tales and further tales within them; with cats and crypts and delphiniums, Egyptian mummies, Basque berets and a myriad of other images recurring -- there is little tonal variation, little dramatic interplay between Thea the narrator and the extracts from her book. 'All I have are my own imaginings,' Thea writes, and Virginia comes across more as a projection than an invention -- in this respect not unlike 'Bridey Murphy' who another Virginia (Virginia Tighe) conjured up. Virginia and Thea -- and Walker? -- seem to speak for each other rather too easily.
Similarly, the images, observations and snippets of information, many of them dutifully sourced, frequently have the sense of being findings, dutifully worked into the narrative. (And anyone who has read Barbara Brooks' biography of Eleanor Dark will see how details of the house and of the contemporary cousins' family disruptions have been bussed in from Varuna.) All of which is fine except for the lingering sense that the test of the pudding, here, is in the recipe.
The result is a novel that is elegantly written, indeed elegantly conceived, but lacking the resonance I felt I had been promised. Are the pairs of cousins linked by more than happenstance? I suspect not. Perhaps Thea's past relationship with Finn allows her access to the Poes' doomed passion? Scarcely. E. Allan said he could not live unless Virginia became his wife. It is a paradox or a cruel blow of the type everyone calls irony these days that Virginia died first. Thea and Finn, however, practised for encounters 'when we grew up' that they seem largely to have missed out on, and the novel's few pointers to a time scale make it clear they have been loners, slightly distanced from the world, for a long time. Reunited at their grandfather's house, they remain chaste, and anecdotal rather than contemplative.