fiction

POETIC PROSE

Michelle Griffin

Anthony Lawrence
In the Half Light
Picador, $35.00hb, 384pp
0 330 36235 6

WRITERS ARE NOT, as a rule, very kind to schizophrenics. They cast them in the role of the mad, bad friend, or the tormented genius, and they fill their mouths with florid poetry or, worse, the Hallmark pieties of Real Truth. What's more, schizophrenics in literature are like the sick young friends of Olympic champions-- almost certain to die, motivating the hero to go on in their name.
      So I began Anthony Lawrence's novel with terrible misgivings, worried that his hypersensitive boy narrator, James Molloy, would succumb to the symptoms of madness as literary conceit. But Lawrence, a poet who has always had strong narrative gifts, avoids all the usual pitfalls and attempts something subtler and satisfying -- to try to articulate the inchoate fears and visions of mental illness without turning it into some ham fisted symbol of the life force. Although Lawrence does fill this novel with people who are both talented and tormented, he never confuses madness and creativity.
      In the world of James Molloy, words and images and sounds and smells all blur together and lose their distinction. He seems at first like he has the gift of synaesthesia, where senses are always interrelated, and sounds have colours, and textures have smells, velvet and chocolate and green violin music. But as the headlights behind his eyes begin to blind him and words break free from his mouth without any meaning, the intensity of experience overwhelms him. What was once a surrealist vision becomes fragmented and formless. This is something relatives and friends would recognize from the smudged syntax of a schizophrenic's correspondence.
      In the Half Light is clearly a novel by a poet. The narrator, James, is a sort of a poet, but more the young man noodling away in a series of scrapbooks than a driven writer, and we never read his work. He is more a lover of poetry, and through him Lawrence preaches the cause to the readers of prose. Molloy reads Richard Wilbur and James Wright in The Faber Book of Modern Verse, and observes, 'I didn't understand everything, but I liked the way the poems made me feel.'
      The book is thick with poetic techniques and perspectives. Emotions are shot through with shafts of light, landscapes tilt and warp, dialogue is replaced by an impressionistic short hand of speech:

She shook a finger in front of Dr Finlay's naked lip. Reckless, We, Better, Stupid, dare, practice, James, Illness my Arse, Come On, and she was leaving the room and we were following her.

      Lawrence also likes to slow down his story for those still points that mark transcendence-- for a glance, for a woman running her hands through her hair, for sunlight on water during a fishing trip. There is quite a lot of fishing in this novel, something Lawrence has carried over from poetry volumes like The Darkwood Aquarium. When a fish is just a fish, these passages are among the best in the book. He also uses it as a metaphor in a couple of key scenes, and it doesn't quite work, or at least not for those like me who can find the image of the hooked fish faintly comic and macabre instead of meditative.
      Early in the story, the teenage James meets Stephanie, a young woman who recognizes him as a fellow schizophrenic, introduces him to poetry, and then disappears, becoming an undercurrent of mystery in the narrative flow.
      The first half of the book is about James' condition, diagnosis and treatment. He dislikes his doctors but takes his pills, although they don't always help. He runs away, returns, and falls in love. Tragedy strikes, James breaks down and is hospitalized. In other novels, the mental ward would become the novel, but Lawrence is not interested in the cuckoo's nest, and discharges James smartly.
      In the second half, James enters a very different story, the one about the sensitive young man's travels through Ireland. It's a wistful and romantic version of Ireland, with only a handful of passing tourists, no golf courses and no pop music. It's just the best bits -- friendly Irish pubs full of youngsters playing folk music on tradition instruments. James has an affair with a beautiful fiddler who is also emotionally fragile, and an alcoholic, and she plays in a band with a gifted musician who... well... closely resembles the archetypal literary madman. This section is less satisfying. The story loses its focus, and replaces intensity of vision with a wuthering love triangle that fails to excite. But at least James is allowed to grow and thrive as a character during this section, even though he is afraid his lover will discover his secret and reject him.

Incomplete:
Michelle Griffin is a Melbourne reviewer, journalist and teacher.

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