fiction

Thea AstleyThea Astley


UNDIMMED OUTRAGE

Kerryn Goldsworthy

Thea Astley
Drylands
Viking $29.95hb, 294pp
0 670 88619 X

DO NOT ATTEMPT to judge this book by its amazingly beautiful but iconographically confusing cover. A close-up photograph of a single leaf shows its veins and pores in tiny detail. The colours are the most pastel and tender of creamy greens. Superimposed over this lush and suggestively fertile image is the book's one-word title: Drylands.
    I love Thea Astley's writing and always have. I love its densely woven grammar, its ingrained humour, its uncompromising politics, its demented metaphors, and its undimmed outrage at human folly, stupidity and greed. I love the way that even at its most savage and despairing, it has always had a suggestion of redemptive energy working away somewhere in the plot, no matter how subterranean, outmanoeuvred or comprehensively beaten down.
    Her new book has all these qualities except, alas, the last. Drylands is Astley's Waste Land , with a cast of exhausted and alienated characters wandering through it in the death-grip of entropy, pursued by fin de siècle furies and other personifications of failure and defeat. In the small town of Drylands there are no fragments shored against anybody's ruin (well, there are, but even the fragments get vandalised and tossed), and there is certainly none of the peace that passeth understanding.
    In one of these Eliot-like character/narrative strands, Benny Shoforth, unacknowledged son of a violent white-boss rapist father and a twelve-year-old Aboriginal housegirl mother, has been driven out of his home and has taken up residence in a cave in the bush, accompanied by his late mother's three-piece Genoa velvet lounge suite. Eventually his malevolent white half-brother Howie Briceland, town councillor, drives him out of there as well. Benny confronts Briceland in a public meeting -- 'I'm your brother!' -- and is hushed up and hustled out by a couple of self-appointed bouncers. On one level, as is clear from this sequence of events, Drylands can be read as a dystopian millennial fable and national allegory, a grim encapsulation of Australian history in general and race relations history in particular on the eve of its Federation centenary.
    Astley's body of work over the last forty years adds up to a protracted study in the way that full-scale violence and tragedy can flower extravagantly from the withered seeds of malice and resentment, and this book is no exception. The perps are all her usual suspects: racists, developers, hypocritical gung-ho civic do-gooders, and assorted unreconstructed male-supremacist swine. This time, though, a new kind of offender has been added to the mix: computers. It's difficult for a reviewer when a novel by a writer she likes is largely based on three premises with which she disagrees: that kids can't read and don't care that they can't read; that the world is going to hell in a handbasket; and that computers are the invention of the devil. One would conclude from this book, moreover, that these three things are closely linked.
    The first of the classic Astley drifters to whom we are introduced, the widowed Janet Deakin, is 'writing a book for the world's last reader'. Janet spends much of her time in mournful meditation on the odium of screen culture in general, and on the passing, as she sees it, of the pleasures of reading and writing:
Out there, yes, out there all over the wide brown land, was a new generation of kids with telly niblets shoved into their mental gobs from the moment they could sit up in a playpen and gawk at a screen, starved of those tactile experiences with paper, the smell of printer's ink, the magic discovery that black symbols on white spelled out pleasures of other distances.
    Print literacy is figured in this book as the thing that could have saved us but is being destroyed; the page and the screen are presented as mutually exclusive and morally opposed.

Incomplete:

Kerryn Goldsworthy is an Adelaide writer.

Return to September 1999 /Letter to the Editor / Australian Book Review