crime fiction

CLOSING TIME

Peter Pierce

Andrew McGahan
Last Drinks
Allen & Unwin, $24.95pb, 377pp
1 86508 406 9

HOW LUCKY CAN YOU get? Just as another political scandal convulses Queensland, through revelations at the Shepherdson inquiry, so a novel is published that draws on the Fitzgerald inquiry of the late 1980s which finally led to the end of thirty-two years of conservative government in the 'Moonlight State'. Andrew McGahan's third novel ('long awaited' trills the blurb), Last Drinks is that most unusual item in Australian literature: an accomplished political fiction. It explores and exposes a net of corruption whose venal operations became so familiar and comfortable to those who benefited that this seemed to them the nature state of things, rather than illegal.
      At the same time as he concentrates on one of the bit players in those scandalous times -- George Verney, a journalist (or rather columnist: he has drifted so far from the craft of reporting that he does not notice when under investigation by one of his own), investor and good time guy. Ten years away from Brisbane, alcohol, his lover Maybellene and all criminal acquaintance, George is holed up in a cool hill town near the New South Wales border called Highwood. There he teases out a living, and does his penance and expiation by working on the local newspaper. But the past is never wholly done with: his old friend, the restauranteur Charlie Monohan, turns up at the sub-station out of town, electrocuted. George is cajoled by the polce to go back to Brisbane to organise the funeral. And so the final consequences of the old days gather to a grim conclusion.
      McGahan successsfully combines the probing analysis of a tormented man who is alcoholic, decently disposed but deeply susceptible to the temptations of ease, with the depiction of the vulgar, crooked world in which he happily knew and took his place. Without condescension, he ponders the paradoxes of Queensland politics, wherein so many were satisfied for so long with quasi-autocratic rule; were strengthened in their complacency by derisive laughter from the south; were either unaware of, or indifferent to the Brisbane of brothels, casinos, public dishonesty that thrived beneath the city's torpid, respectable, 1950s facade.
      George comes back to a city transformed. There are throngs of people on the streets and by the river, at liberty, carefree, with time on their hands:

A philosophical shift had taken place. The pubs I'd know had always been dark places, colonial, rejecting the sun, like caves into which you retreated to drink.

      Now -- like the city -- they have opened up, apparently with nothing to hide. There are survivors of the murky recent times: the fixer, Lindsay Heath, reduced to running a steak and lap-top dancing emporium; the former (and of course disgraced) government minister Marvin McNulty, a recluse who has written an acidulous account of his heyday and its hangers-on; the senior bureaucrat Sir Jeremy. Dying, the latter had hired a young woman to drink for him. In the most hideously compelling scene of the novel, George renews acquaintance. His own guilt and mouldering despair are intensified with each step into the past, each revelation of what others thought of him, of all that he had misapprehended.
      Until May reappears, McGahan handles action and dialogue (the hardest tasks, besides sex, for the thriller writer) with uncommon aplomb. Her arrival is marked by talk that is more stilted, rather because of men's bad faith where she is concerned that that a lady is present. Her pivotal role in Last Drinks is as a victim who is also a seductress. It is a story whose sum seems improbable but whose every step -- from anti-government activist and gaoled arsonist to Sir Jeremy's 'assistant' and Charlie's wife -- is persuasively and sympathetically related by McGahan. In a novel saturated with frenetic and self-destructive boozing, that aspect of May's life is carefully delineated from its beginning.
      Ken Stewart once reckoned that no Australian novel had more bibulous characters in it than The Fortunes of Richard Mahony. Richardson might have to stand aside. In McGahan's book, alcohol is the indispensable lubricant for every kind of malice, mischief, misappropriation and the merriment that followed. He is alert to the smell of drinkers, the effects of liquor on the shape of their eyes, the recognition and complicity between them. readers have a short and instructive tour of a couple of Brisbane de-tox centres and witness the slow ruin of lives to be found there: one is for the rich, the other for the poor, both for the desperates who know how temporary is this respite.

Incomplete:
Peter Pierce is Professor of Australian Literature at James Cook University

Your comments are invited: email them in a letter toAustralian Book Review
Return to Australian Book Review /December 2000/January 2001