crime fiction

TOO MUCH IN VIEW

Stephanie Trigg

Finola Moorhead
darkness more visible
Spinifex Press, $24.95pb, 649pp
1 875559 60 4

JUST BECAUSE A NOVEL is long, it isn't necessarily an epic. And just because a detective finds a body in the public toilets in the first chapter, it isn't necessarily a detective story. So much is clear, from reading Finola Moorhead's latest novel, darkness more visible, although the promotional blurbs make free with those generic labels. In The Monkey's Mask, Dorothy Porter managed to pull off the unlikely combination of detective fiction with poetry. In comparison, Moorhead makes Porter's novel seem effortless. Detective fiction, after all, is motivated by plot, and thrives on incident, suspense and fast pace. The epic qualities of darkness more visible, on the other hand, seem to mitigate against that intensity. If anything, the two genres take turns to occupy the foreground of this novel. Some readers may experience this feature as an interesting, productive exercise in the destabilisation of genre; others may feel, like this reviewer, that Moorhead is trying to accomplish too much in one work.
      This is a leisurely, sprawling novel, set in and around a lesbian separatist community on the rural east coast of Australia. The detective plot is focused through Margot Gorman, the heroine of Moorhead's Still Murder. Gorman is an ex-cop, now private detective and professional triathlete, simultaneously investigating several deaths, some financial misappropriation, and the destruction of a bridge in Lesbianlands. Sabotage and conspiracy, both within and outside the community, are dominant themes. In addition to the two early deaths, there are other, more or less mysterious deaths; a kidnapping; a mysterious hacker on the internet site Wimmin.com.au; drug-dealing; rumours of alien landings; and various other conspiracies, local and global. But sometimes, the debate is often conducted in terms of dreadful simplicity: 'The war on drugs must be maintained!' Gorman tells us, at one point.
      If you can adapt to the leisurely pace of this novel, you may well enjoy its meditations on lesbianism, drug culture, feminist philosophy, the use of the internet, and global capitalism, for example. (Though in the last instance, it takes about three hundred pages for Margot Gorman to realise there might be ethical problems in signing a new sponsorship contract with Nike.) But you will probably forget about the body in the toilets for the first few hundred pages. And so when the pace of detection starts to pick up at the half-way point, and when the many characters have settled into a pattern of some familiarity, you may feel the first third of the novel has been little more than elaborate stage-setting for the more exciting plot developments and the resolution of a number of important relationships amongst the women in the last third of the novel.
      There's another cause of the tonal and structural instability here. The novel is built of fragments and scenes in seven 'books' whose time scale spans about four weeks in the life of the community, its outdwellers and transient visitors. The narrative mode in about half of these fragments is omniscient; but the other half is focalised through Margot Gorman, who for the first three quarters of the novel, appears only as the subject of her own first-person narrative, the standard mode of detective fiction. This mixture is disconcerting. For example, we read several scenes in which the women debate whether to ask Margot to investigate the collapse of their bridge; then, over one hundred pages later, we read, through Margot, 'Rory had a job for me. Unaccountably, a bridge on Lesbianlands had been destroyed.' There's little narrative tension here of the kind that makes detective fiction hard to put down.

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