John Scott
The Architect
Viking, $27.00hb, 174pp, 0 670 91044 9

IS IT POSSIBLE to admire a novel, to have enjoyed it on both first and second readings, yet to remain unconvinced that one can with confidence say what it is about? Isn't that rather the complex response that poetry excites? Here it might be noted that John Scott, who subtitles The Architect not 'a novel' but 'a tale', is a poet turned novelist, as is his friend David Brooks, of whose House of Balthus something similar might be said. 'Poetry must resist the intelligence almost successfully,' as Wallace Stevens opined.

John Scott is the author of thirteen books of poetry and prose. His works have been published in the USA and the UK, and have been translated into French, German and Dutch. For some reason I am reminded of the American novelist John Hawkes, author of The Cannibal, who remarked that he had a more appreciative audience in translation in France and Germany than he did at home in his native language. There is something 'European' about John Scott's fiction, as there is about David Brooks's, and this is not merely a reference to setting. His novel What I Have Written won the 1994 Victorian Premier's Prize and was made into an award-winning film of the same name, directed by John Hughes. Other works include Before I Wake, a sequence of five novellas, the novel Blair, and Selected Poems 1968-90.

The Architect in fact concerns two architects, the young Australian Andrew Martin and the septuagenarian German genius Johannes Von Ruhland, whose plans have never been realised in a building. By courtesy of a conference in Berlin, Martin meets the elusive Master, lives in his house, is taken under his not unthreatening wing, falls in love with him, and conspires with him to pass off the Master's plans for an architectural competition as his own, Von Ruhland's work being, as Gertrude Stein said in a different context, inaccrochable because of the German's Nazi past and his work on an ethnic-cleansing complex. Martin returns to Melbourne, loses his wife and daughter, if not the whole world, and goes to Kyoto to accept the prize. Then the catastrophe. Von Ruhland reveals Martin to be a plagiarist and thief. Martin definitely loses all, even Von Ruhland, who has disappeared like a deus absconditus. Martin's pursuit of the elder éminence grise leads him back into Germany's dark past and to his own death. I am reminded of the complexities of the American-Israeli novelist Walter Abish's How German Is It.

Young English novelists such as Alain de Botton and Laurence Norfolk write as if they were European, to the annoyance of some of their Blimpish compatriots. (Recall the similar complaints Mark Henshaw's Out of the Line of Fire provoked here some years ago.) American novelists of an earlier generation — Hawkes, Abish, William H. Gass — write 'European' novels with European locations or concerns. Germany, particularly National Socialist Germany, obsesses these fiction writers. So it is with The Architect.

What I have written two paragraphs above seems a not unfair if oversimplified account of the plot of The Architect. But which architect? Who is protagonist, who antagonist? Martin or Von Ruhland? This plot, this tale, is, however, utterly transformed by an epigraph and by its 'Prologue' and 'Epilogue'. The epigraph is from Job 4:17: 'Shall mortal man be more just than God? Shall a man be more pure than his maker?' In the one-page prologue, Von Ruhland addresses his image in a mirror, and determines to 'touch' the life of one whom I take to be Martin. The epilogue underscores the eschatological implications of the prologue. So what we may have in John Scott's 'tale' — why that categorisation? — is that perhaps unfashionable form, an allegory, with Martin as Job and Von Ruhland as God. Son and Father. Lovers, in that tradition understood by St Teresa, St John of the Cross, John Donne. Scott acknowledges commentaries by Carl Jung and David Wolpers on the Book of Job. I had the feeling I should revisit Walter Benjamin's early book on German Baroque drama and his essay on 'The Storyteller'.

Things German pervade the tale: Nietzsche, Faust, the Triumph of the Will. Martin might have thought of Rilke's Angel: 'You must change your life.' The erotic in the tale seems to owe something to Helmut Newton's Teutonic fantasies. But any doubt that the tale has an allegorical dimension — did not allegory die with Kafka? — is surely dispelled in chapter thirty-six, in which Von Ruhland speaks to Martin as from a whirlwind. Martin/Job responds:

'I'd heard about you for so long,' Martin said, the tears welling in his eyes. 'I have read. How many times? Often just the mention of your name — somebody calling upon it, a metaphor, a memory, a wish. That is all. And the traces I found. All those references. For so long. But now I have truly seen you and your works, I despise myself for these thing I have done, for which I can never make amends. I weep for myself, for these others, and for us all.'

After that revelation, it remains but for Martin to die a death that is both only too realistically credible in contemporary Germany, and Kafkaesque.

What better embodiment of God than as an Architect? If The Architect be a tale, it is a philosophical fable also, executed in John Scott's typically cool, lucid prose. The tale is not so much in the belly of an architect as the folly of an architect. It is also a dialogue between soul and body. One question remains: How Australian is it? The Architect, its Melbourne settings notwithstanding, is a long way from Alan Wearne's suburbs. Perhaps it is best to say of Australia, as Oscar Wilde, the Irish Nietzsche, did of Japan: 'There is no such place. There are no such people.'