Love
and Longeurs
David McCooey
Alan Wearne
The Lovemakers: Book Two: Money and Nothing
ABC Books, $34.95 pb, 398pp, 0733313590
Alan
Wearne’s The Lovemakers is a book about overdoing
it. Its characters have unwise love affairs, dream foolish dreams,
drink too much, engage in criminal activity, amass (and lose)
vast wealth, and talk incessantly (usually about themselves).
Wearne’s characters usually deal with obsession and with
the places you get to
in life if you overdo things. Few characters in this second part
of Wearne’s epic verse novel age gracefully, and some don’t
get to age at all. But The Lovemakers isn’t just about
over-doing it: it performs overdoing it. Wearne’s aesthetic
is one of excess, of conspicuous idiosyncrasy. Part of its excessiveness
and oddity is its oxymoronic status. Wearne’s books are simultaneously
poetic and prosy, realistic and outré,
stylistically heterogeneous and tonally homogenous.
But I said as much when I reviewed the first part of The Lovemakers
(ABR, April 2001). After a gap of three years, the second
part, Money and Nothing, has surprisingly been published by ABC
Books. (Penguin, who published the first volume, presumably dropped
the prize-winning project midway.) Considering both volumes together,
it is clear that the most excessive feature of this work is its
length. As the second half of a 750-page verse novel (if that’s
what it is), The Lovemakers is impressive purely in terms
of scale. The numerous characters, events, experiments with rhyme
and stanza forms, all illustrate a rare imaginative fecundity
and poetic ambition. The Lovemakers is nothing less than
a portrait of a generation of Australians, and, in this second
half of the work, we move from the late 1970s into the horrible
1980s and beyond. The Lovemakers is a prolix yet diffuse work.
It would be impossible to give a synopsis of the plot (if it has
one). There are stories to do with Kim Lacy, the drug dealer and
banker manqué; with the 1980s-style entrepreneur Craig
Stubbs (for me, the source of one of the book’s longueurs);
with Wal, who dies for being gay; with Carrie, the nurse turned
sex worker; and with numerous others, whose stories intricately
interrelate and ironically comment upon one another. For all the
work’s similarity with the Victorian novel (its size, its
digressiveness, its concern with the way we live now), it has
far less interest in individual heroes and clear narrative lines.
It works by accretion and intersection.
The stories in The Lovemakers are as much about milieux
as individuals. There are stories about Canberra, a school reunion,
a Sydney party, drug running, the business world and the professional
sporting world. Wearne isn’t so much interested in the opportunities
that multiple narrative perspectives offer (in the way that the
modernists were) as with giving a sense of multiplicity and the
complex narrative networks that make up generations, society and
selfhood. There are, of course, thematic constants that make these
stories more or less cohere. In particular, Wearne, like Freud,
is interested in love and work, or more generally the pursuit
of happiness. The gay psychologist, Benny, is only one of numerous
characters searching for ‘That unending fix, true happiness’,
suggesting that happiness and obsession are often interleaved.
The stories to do with drug dealing make this explicit. As Kim
puts it, if ‘We’re all so wired to get-get-getting’,
then ‘Just by wanting it love can be smack’. This in
turn suggests that Wearne’s characters will do all sorts
of things for both love and money. The emphasis on money and business
dealings (criminal, legit, sex work, the media, sport) is present
not merely because Wearne’s characters have aged and we’ve
reached the entrepreneurial 1980s: it tells us something about
the interconnectedness of all those dealings.
These large themes are important, but one of the pleasures of
this hefty book is the attention to small things. The Lovemakers
is really all detail: references to songs, to places, to the micro-narratives
of daily life, to the cumulative circularities of the working
mind. Wearne’s attention to his characters’ language
has long been commented on, though it is one of Wearne’s
mysteries that he manages to give all his speakers a strangely
similar tone. He does this through a disjunction of lexis but
a conjunction of syntax in the stories. The love of detail in
The Lovemakers is also seen in the gnomic touches in its
narrators’ observations (‘Part farce / part melodrama,
the rich are our mirror’), and in the moments of striking
imagery (‘an old grey battleship of / a hang-over blazed
home’).
Amid this, there is a sense of life as both chimerical and disconcertingly
real in its effects. Sophie Cross, the lawyer romantically involved
with Kim who has done away with his business partner, Kevin, thinks
this about her situation:
Weren’t
certain tracts of life just plain invisible? Oh heaps!
As Kevin had ‘vanished’ so she’d never seen any
actual ‘dope’
(or whatever it was; for that matter every dollar note
she’d earned).
Which gave her a power and yes, to admit it, the creeps.
This
is a paradigmatic moment in The Lovemakers, since it is
a work that deals with the invisible realities of life, many of
which are painful, immoral or dangerous. Love, the book seems
to suggest, could be the definitive expression of this, presumably
the point of the lawyer being in love with the criminal.
Power, too, comes into it, as it comes into love, and one of the
exceptional features of The Lovemakers is its creative
power. Part of Wearne’s performance is to show us a novel
in what appears to be exclusively poetic forms. Hence the sequences
made up of that most intractable of poetic forms, the sestina,
Wearne’s use of which is nothing less than amazing. Wearne
is also attracted to using rhyme in quatrains and couplets, with
sometimes surprisingly complex substitutions and half rhymes,
and, as has been the case throughout his career, dramatic monologue.
One of the most amusing sequences — which finally sews up
the love story of Neil and Barb — has each quatrain ending
on the word ‘Tullamarine’.
This is tour de force stuff and suggests that comparisons with
nineteenth-century
fiction or soap opera or melodrama are missing one of the most
obvious points of comparison: light verse, hence the emphasis
on technique and rhyme. The Lovemakers is a kind of vers
de société taken to the level of high art. Perhaps
more telling is a comparison with Byron’s Don Juan.
While one would not want to overdo such a comparison, it is useful;
though Wearne is no Byron, the use of light verse as a serious
form is a significant choice for both writers. In both their works,
we find not just complexity and poetic capaciousness but also
a kind of mocking seriousness.
The juxtaposition of the serious and the comic, and the use of
colloquial diction, are clearly related, and one could imagine
some of Wearne’s less appealing characters coming up with
this moment from Canto VI of Don Juan: ‘So now all
things
are damned, one feels at ease.’
Like Don Juan, The Lovemakers is both ‘important’
and ‘entertaining’. Its comedy can be savage, its melodrama
moving. Once again, if there is anything curiously missing
in this vast group portrait, it is children (so central to the
emotional and imaginative lives of most people). But Wearne’s
narrative is an adult one, and it makes clear that, for all the
world is bleak and exploitative, there are adult solaces: love,
friendship, poetry.
David
McCooey teaches at Deakin University.
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