fiction
John McLaren
Liam Davison
The Betrayal
Penguin/Viking $22.95pb, 274pp, 0 670 88652 1
LIAM DAVISON'S LATEST novel, The Betrayal, is haunted by powerful European myths of water and forests. It begins with the betrayal of hope and healing as water is drained from a lake in Australia.
It ends with divers surfacing from a fountain in France, and cold
water on the skin of a woman facing her past as she recovers her
daughter. In between, the reader is taken on a journey into that
past and its complex betrayals, and deep into the subterranean
waters that feed the fountain and the lake, and symbolise the
past that we constantly seek to recapture or repudiate even as
we remake it in our present.
Davison's narrative is an extended meditation on the meaning of
time and place. His central character, Judith, or Judith-Marie
as she is known in France, is trapped in a middle-age of pain and
loneliness. At the beginning of the novel she has put herself
into residential care under the supervision of a Doctor Menadue,
who may or may not be a charlatan, but who comforts her with successive but always vain promises of a cure for her chronic pain. A letter from her daughter prompts her to return through the history of her failed marriage to her youthful days of teaching in France, her visits to the Fontaine de Vaucluse, her strange preoccupation with a local market trader, and her discovery of the black secrets at the heart of the village. By facing her betrayal of these secrets, she admits her failure of understanding and finds the courage to face her own future.
This bare account of the narrative themes falls far short of doing justice to the novel. The simple story, although suggestive in its tone and poetic in its symbolism, at first seems to lack purpose. Judith does not seem a particularly interesting character, and the plot seems to hinge on withheld information rather than on the promise of discovery. But the mystery of events, the nature of the crime that Judith witnesses, and the identity of its perpetrator, lead us into the fountain, below the surface and into the mysteries of history where knowledge of the facts leaves us still perplexed about their meaning. In Davison's narrative, the present is an extension of a past that stretches back through the murderous hatreds of war and the passions of courtly love to the primordial forests that covered Europe. Only by penetrating the forests and the springs can we discover the knowledge that will free us to live in the present.
Although the novel takes Judith into these mythological depths, she gains her freedom only by taking action in the present. She leaves a packet of tissues to comfort Mrs Vickery, her neighbour in the rest home, who sobs inconsolably through the night. She writes the letter that frees her from Doctor Menadue. She returns to Europe to meet her daughter and go back to the fountain. She lets go of the resentments that tie her to her past.
The waters and lakes of Australia, or more specifically of central Victoria, and the subdivisions of suburban Melbourne signify this present in opposition to the European past. The subdivisions cut people off from any past, from each other, and from themselves. The convalescent home by the lake frees them from responsibility for themselves, and so entraps them in its corridors and routines. But, unlike the fountain, this lake is drained, restoring evidence of a past which, unlike the hatreds of Europe, is gone for ever, but can still yield living treasure for the garden.