fiction
Laurie Clancy
Bryce Courtenay
Jessica
Viking $36.95hb, 587pp, 0 670 88351 4
AMONG THE MANY problematic issues that Bryce Courtenay's strange new novel raises, two stand out in particular for me. One is the
length of the book, from a writer who is said to pride himself
on his economy of words. The novel is extraordinarily repetitive
and leisurely paced in its narrative. For instance, it starts
with the eponymous Jessica preparing to shoot a group of snakes
that have been robbing her hens. This takes up twenty meditative
pages as the author ruminates over Jessica's life to that time.
The scene proves to be prophetic, providing a framing device
around the novel. Jessica's foolishness in firing off both
barrels of her shotgun doesn't matter in this case but many years
later proves tragic.
Similarly, later in chapters four and five Jessica attempts toprotect a man who has murdered three women from the threats of
a lynch mob. Why the mob should be intent on lynching him is hard
to understand since it is transparently obvious, not only to the
reader but to the other characters that the man has become
deranged as a result of a terrible injury to his head. Hence the name he has had bestowed on him of Billy Simple. Nevertheless we are assured over and over again that if the mob of drunken shearers and stockmen get hold of Billy they will either string him up to the nearest branch or shoot him and leave him for the dingoes and the crows. There are a dozen or so references to this.
The other puzzling issue is the degree to which the novel is based on fact. Courtenay is rather evasive on this point. In the 'Acknowledgments' he talks of a couple 'who brought me the story of Jessica in the first instance and gave generously of their time and hospitality in helping with the research'. In the Viking hand-out accompanying the novel he is quoted as saying that I'd like to think that the books I write have the 'ring of truth' about them. Ideally readers should be able to say, 'Did this truly happen?' With Jessica, I can honestly say that this story is about as close as I can get to the truth while still veiling it in fiction.
In an interview with Claire Heaney in the Herald Sun, he tells us that the story came from a woman who wrote to him about her aunt and finally, giving up on being able to tell the story herself, gave it to Courtenay.
It's a story that, on the face of it, seems quite improbable, heavily dependent on coincidence and depicting most of its protagonists in the starkest of black and white terms. Jessica behaves with total honour; her mother and sister Meg scheme and cheat and misuse her brutally. As well, if it's based on fact, who knows the truth of the story? For instance, it never emerges that Jessica's parents murdered Mrs Baker to stop her talking. No surviving character knows this and no reference is made to it. At one stage the novel offers us two italicised pages purporting to offer documentary proof that Jessica spent four years in an asylum, that her baby was taken by her sister and mother, and that her lover was killed in action in World War 1.
Courtenay, at any rate, writes about these events with uninhibited gusto. He is probably at his best when writing about violence (the death of Jessica's three dogs, for instance) and at his worst when writing about sex, which he doesn't do very often. Jessica's sexual ignorance and naivety are made much of and a strange emphasis on her habit of masturbating combines with irritating premonitions of her eventual fate: 'When, at eleven, Jessica discovered the joy her fingers could give her she did not for one moment associate them with the same hands that would one day lead her to sin and temptation and onwards from there to an untimely death.'