fiction

DON'T WAIT TO READ

John Clare

Martin Armiger
The Waiters
Text $27.50pb, 280pp
1 876485 57 4

THE BLURB WOULD HAVE it that The Waiters is a 'brilliant satire of Sydney cafe society'. I'm not sure that it is a satire exactly,but it is certainly brilliant. On the face of it I am the last person who should be reviewing it. Or maybe not. I live in Sydney but know not one soul in cafe or any other society. This could have something to do with the fact that I was born here. To briefly elaborate this theme, there have been times when I have had to move out of areas as they became fashionable, and some odd overlaps have occurred. At Tamarama, for instance, we of the old guard were still lining up on the headland like penguins -- ready, withour twenty-year-old flippers and daggy handboards,to dive into the rippy, ragged surf -- while the fashionables, creative types and beautifulpeople lounged on the rocks behind us. Each faction was less substantial to the other than a hologram.
      A book that can raise a flicker of interest in me with regard to this level of society is a well-made book indeed. Armiger, who is a successful composer of sound tracks -- if Come In Spinner being perhaps the best known -- has used that strange subservient, arrogant,invisible and intrusive army of waiters to reflect the fashionable life. As the title clearly signals, the waiters themselves -- two of them at least -- become the focus of the book rather than its background. But is there really anything to them?
      Very obvious signals are embodied in many of the characters' names. The centre of the book is aconsumate waiter called William Nott. Is he so good, so understated, socalmly confident, so impartial in his distribution of gossip because there is not much happening beneath his affable surface?
      Like many another waiter, William has drifted into the waiting game, leaving other vague ambitions on hold. He effortlessly holds the floor in a cafe that is situated pretty near the Bar Colluzzi at Kings Cross. No, I've never been in there, so I can't make comparisons. In a kind of Dice Man moment, William decides to marry a waitress from the UK called Vivien Edge, who is having trouble getting permanent Australian resident status. With a nicely calculated distancing effect, William is shown entertaining the idea that he has actually met the woman of his dreams. It is just an idea, but could be true. Then again he might be entering a marriage of convenience out of sheer indifference to his fate -- which in a floating, detached way is a sort of tragic one. Sort of.
      William is from Adelaide, and most of the other characters are people who have brought their talents and ambitions to Sydney from elsewhere. I am sure that in this regard Sydney is a tiny bit like New York. In stark contrast to William, Vivien is a bad waiter. The bad waiter's knack of not seeing or hearing exasperated patrons is described succinctly.
      Unlike William, Vivien still holds to an extra-waiting ambition: to write a book on Sydney architecture. Yet she too is starting to drift. Armiger's book is quite different in tone to other films and books that have used bounders and cocktail waitresses as their foreground/ background. It is very understated yet rises to hilarious and sometimes moving heights. My first impression was that I could write as well as this if I tried a bit harder, but it was not long before I realised that I was having myself on. Not that it bothered me. I was born here, after all.
      The topography of Sydney is effortlessly evoked. The glib discussions of art, musicand film seem absolutely authentic. There are even people I think I recognize. Is that big-jawed, bereted and overbearing artist not Jon Olsen? Maybe not, but I hope it is because I can't stand what I have seen of the fellow on television. Somebody I do recognize is the obscure but brilliant Adelaide jazz pianist Ted Nettlebeck. Armiger has called him Ted Haversack. Sometimes it is only the names that let Armiger down. Ted Haversack, for godsake!
      Above all the book is highly readable and entertaining. Armiger may not go much deeperinto the real core of his characters than, say, P.G. Wodehouse, but I am prepared to give him the benefit of the doubt and say that this was his intention.
      I do, however, have one other objection. Why is it that in almost every book of fiction I have read recently men complete the sex act in minutes? When I was interested in sex -- as recently as five or six years ago in fact -- I always felt frustrated if I was asked to climax in under half an hour. Whether this lack of urgency and frenzy had anything to do with the fact that I was born here I cannot say.

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