Alan Gould
fiction
A CHILD'S VOICE REBORN
Andrew Riemer
Alan Gould
The Schoonermaster's Dance
Flamingo $27.50pb, 274pp
0 7322 66548
Alan Gould
ALAN GOULD'S NEW NOVEL -- his most ambitious so far -- ends with twenty or so pages of magnificent writing. A young girl, Maie Alice, describes a long sea voyage with her parents in 1900 -- her father was the master of one of the last of the great ocean-going sailing ships. Their journey took them south from England, across the Atlantic, into the terrible seas around Cape Horn and so to the Pacific and North America. On the return voyage they make for Valparaíso in Chile. A sudden, fierce storm wrenches the vessel from its anchorage. The company spends a terror-filled night clinging to the rigging. Then the ship breaks apart.
The child's voice is most effectively evoked. Pert and precocious, inquisitive and possessing a wisdom beyond her years, she describes the stages of the voyage in language which is highly stylised yet conveys the sensations of intensely lived experiences. Maie Alice's narrative is filled with vivid, tactile images: the brass buttons on her father's coat; coils of rope rising like snakes as the ship's crew tends the rigging; the crowded shipping in the Thames estuary.
There is nevertheless something odd, indeed ghostly about this narrative -- and appropriately so, for Maie Alice's story is told from beyond the grave. Early in The Schoonermaster's Dance we learn that the young girl, her mother and several members of the crew perished in the disaster. The bulk of Gould's novel is taken up with the tortuous manner in which Maie Alice is reborn in the obsessed imagination of its central character.
This is an Englishwoman called Sarah Tilber. Early in life she became absorbed by her father's attempts to construct the Tilber family tree. One relative in particular seizes on Sarah's imagination and fantasies: her great-uncle Charles, a seaman, about whom little is known except that he probably ended his life in South Australia.
So Sarah spends most of her energies on uncovering the story of her great-uncle. Everything is sacrificed to her grand obsession, even her marriage to a mild, ineffectual Australian she meets among the steep lanes and gargoyles of Lincoln, the ancient cathedral city. She leaves him and their prosaic house in a Canberra suburb to lead a shiftless, provisional life searching for clues to her relative's adventures. In the course of her painstaking quest, she comes upon people who remember her great-uncle: an elderly man who, as a lad, had sailed with Captain Tilber; and a woman who had nursed the senile schoonermaster in his last days. From these she picks up tantalisingly vague snippets of a vanished life, in particular a memory of how the crusty Captain performed a strange, stately hornpipe in front of an audience of bemused revellers.
With all this Gould has embraced a large-scale metaphysical theme. Sarah comes more and more to be possessed by the past. Her thoughts, her energies and eventually her whole being are distilled into a curiously -- indeed disturbingly -- vicarious life. Her desire to learn the truth about her great-uncle and his part in the disaster in Chile transforms her into someone for whom the present seems almost non-existent, someone who cannot continue to live except by immersing herself in the hypothetical, the might-have-been. And so, at the end, she becomes, in a way, the young Maie Alice, allowing that long-dead child to speak with what Sarah knows to be the girl's true voice.
The ambition behind The Schoonermaster's Dance is bold and admirable. Whether Gould has fulfilled his ambition with the reined-in manner he has chosen for this fundamentally romantic tale remains questionable. The novel is cast in the form of a memoir by Sarah's childhood friend Jennifer, a sensible, pragmatic woman, the wife of a boarding-school headmaster, who becomes Sarah's lifelong confidant and confessor. The large part of Gould's novel consists of Sarah's letters, from Australia, Chile and other parts of the world, to her friend in England. These self-absorbed confessions are interspersed with Jennifer's much more down-to-earth comments and misgivings about the curious direction her friend's life has taken.
From one point of view Gould's restraint represents a shrewd calculation. Sarah's endless preoccupation with an ancestor whose life seems to have been relatively unremarkable could easily spill over into hyperbole -- as it does on occasions. Jennifer furnishes, therefore, the traditional and vital function of playing Horatio, the sympathetic but sceptical friend, to Sarah's Hamlet. Time after time, her asides anticipate what would no doubt be the response of most readers: that Sarah is carrying on mightily about a trivial obsession.
There is something impoverished, nevertheless, about Gould's determination not to let his novel stray beyond the confines he has so painstakingly marked out. Once more, the impulse seems to me commendable: better this than wild pyrotechnics. And yet, apart from those splendid closing pages, much of this novel left me respectful certainly, rather than enthralled or exhilarated.
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Return to Australian Book Review /September 2000