Praise for Questions of Travel
‘Questions of Travel is a grand and intellectual work, a unique study on the essence of modern time, how we travel in it and through it.’ Rebecca Starford, Sydney Morning Herald
‘Michelle de Kretser’s sweeping and virtuosic novel is not just about travel; it’s a journey through late 20th century existence … her luminous vignettes are humane and nuanced and while her touch is feather-light, her epigrammatic prose is piercing. An outstanding novel.’ Daily Mail
‘As the paths of destiny cross and recross, Michelle de Kretser shows astonishing dexterity in managing the double helix of her narrative, combined with a generosity of description. In the great tradition of Christina Stead and Shirley Hazzard, de Kretser celebrates the new connectedness of the world as a hopeful new phase of humanity. Bravissima.’ Simon Hughes, Australian Financial Review
‘Novel by novel, the Sri Lankan-born Australian has emerged as one of the most fiercely intelligent voices in fiction today. This new work, her most ambitious yet, makes globalisation and its discontents the focus of a multi-faceted story that unites grandeur and intimacy.’ Independent
‘De Kretser writes brilliantly about passion and about sexual politics … She is a serious and seriously entertaining novelist. She writes with an unflinching gaze, not least during the novel’s devastating and beautifully constructed ending.’ Patrick Allington, Adelaide Advertiser
‘An unexpectedly full and moving work: the best that the talented and justly celebrated Sri Lankan-born Australian author has yet produced ... Russian dissident poet Joseph Brodsky once suggested democracy was the greatest masterpiece. Yes, de Kretser’s novel is impeccably written. Yet what makes it beautiful is that it proceeds as if Brodsky’s remark were self-evidently true.’ Geordie Williamson, The Australian
‘This is a big, ambitious novel of Sydney and the world, globalisation and divided identities. It is everywhere full of intelligence and a vivid sense of individual lives.’ Owen Richardson, The Monthly
‘Questions of Travel (Allen & Unwin) is as good as everyone says: satirical, but also shocking, lit by a fine, perfectly controlled fury.’ Charlotte Wood, The Age
‘Brilliantly observed…While de Kretser doesn’t provide the expected satisfactions, she offers deadly darts of observation that puncture clichés and deflate false enthusiasm. In the end she leaves you flat on the ground, possessed of harder truths.’ Publishers Weekly
‘Questions of Travel combines the ambitious themes of Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom with the poetic details of Gail Jones’ Five Bells. And the prose will knock your socks off.’ Andrea Hanke, Australian Bookseller + Publisher
‘Michelle de Kretser’s fourth novel is her most accomplished. As always, she cajoles Australian readers into seeing ourselves as others—in Europe and Asia—see us ... Particularly adept in dealing with ethnic stereotypes of all kinds, de Kretser surreptitiously mocks, mirror-reverses, or demolishes them. In Laura the freelance travel writer, she has a created a late twentieth century global person, for whom geography is beside the point. She has also created Ravi, an utterly different product of the same generation. Ravi’s return, in the end, to Sri Lanka, coinciding with Laura’s visit there, promises a happy outcome, but the consummation is both shocking and devastating.’ Alison Broinowski, Canberra Times
‘…a serious achievement…shatteringly perceptive…a state-of-the-nation novel, not artificially worked out of some political premise, but built backwards, gently and modestly.’ Ophelia Field, Literary Review
‘…a fascinating read for anyone who travels regularly—which, in 2013, is set to be a billion souls. This truly is a book for our times.’ The Irish Times
‘…sprawlingly assured ... prose that is witty, absorbing and florid with ideas…[a] long, eventful journey but the destination is worth it.’ Scotland on Sunday
‘The writing is so superb and the observations so keen ... ultimately, its rewards are great.’ Sunday Business Post
‘De Kretser is an elegant, intelligent stylist; this is an impressive novel.’ South China Morning Post
‘The contrasts between Laura’s privileged life as an Australian girl able to travel the world for pleasure and the bitterness of Ravi’s forced exile in Australia from the then war-torn Sri Lanka could hardly be greater. In a sensual, reflective style, de Kretser loosely plaits their compelling stories, finally pulling them together as they both face their feelings about home.’ Saga
Praise for The Lost Dog
‘This is the best novel I have read in a long time.’ A.S. Byatt
‘Reading The Lost Dog one is torn between contradictory urges—to race ahead, in order to find out what happens, and to linger in admiration of de Kretser’s ravishing style.’ New Statesman
‘The Lost Dog is an uncompromisingly literary (and literate) book: ferociously intelligent, highbrow, allusive and unflinching in its probing of the question, “What relation does the individual have to history?” It is equally intransigent with its oblique, sometimes scathing answers. A book such as this, so preternaturally attuned to listening to “the patient rage of history,” is marvelously layered palimpsest.’ Neel Mukherjee, Time
‘Michelle de Kretser is one of those rare writers whose work balances substance with style. Her writing is very witty, but it also goes deep, informed at every point by a benign and far-reaching intelligence…so engaging and thought-provoking and its subject matter so substantial that the reader notices only in passing how funny it is.’ Kerryn Goldsworthy, Sydney Morning Herald
‘This is a stunning book, each sentence handcrafted with precision, each theme hauntingly explored…De Kretser weaves a magical web, juxtaposing continents, attitudes to literature and art, the wildness of the natural world with the empty heart of cityscapes. She highlights the fragility and selectiveness of memory and contrasts the brash soul of 21st-century living with the poetry of what we have lost. What emerges is an achingly personal perspective on history. And it is a joy to read such gloriously paced, beautifully written prose.’ Good Reading
‘…a dazzlingly accomplished author who commands all the strokes. Her repertoire stretches from a hallucinatory sense of place to a mastery of suspense, sophisticated verbal artistry and a formidable skill in navigating those twisty paths where history and psychology entwine.’ Boyd Tonkin, Independent
‘Lucky readers will discover the trickery of Michelle de Kretser’s The Lost Dog only upon finishing reading it, at which point the author reveals her astonishing sleight of hand…an uncannily compelling mystery.’ Washington Post
Michelle de Kretser was born in Sri Lanka and lives in Australia. She went to university in Melbourne and Paris, and is an honorary associate of the English Department at the University of Sydney. Her fiction is published across the world and has won numerous prizes, including the Miles Franklin Literary Award.
OTHER BOOKS
The Rose Grower
The Hamilton Case
The Lost Dog
Questions of Travel
Springtime
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organisations, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
First published in 2017
Copyright © Michelle de Kretser 2017
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per
cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to the Copyright Agency (Australia) under the Act.
Allen & Unwin
83 Alexander Street
Crows Nest NSW 2065
Australia
Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100
Email: [email protected]
Web: www.allenandunwin.com
Cataloguing-in-Publication details are available from the National Library of Australia
www.trove.nla.gov.au
ISBN 978 1 76029 656 8
eISBN 978 1 92557 566 8
Set by Midland Typesetters
Cover design: Sandy Cull, gogoGingko
For Chris
and in memory of faithful Oliver
CLOV: Do you believe in the life to come?
HAMM: Mine was always that.
Samuel Beckett, Endgame
CONTENTS
I THE FICTIVE SELF
II THE ASHFIELD TAMIL
III THE MUSEUM OF ROMANTIC LIFE
IV PIPPA PASSES
V OLLY FAITHFUL
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I
THE FICTIVE SELF
THE HOUSE BY THE RIVER belonged to an old man whose relationship to George Meshaw was complicated but easily covered by ‘cousin’. He had lived there alone, with a painting that was probably a Bonnard. Now he was in a nursing home, following a stroke, and George’s mother had taken charge of the painting. It was her idea that George should live in the house until it was clear whether or not their cousin was coming home. She had flown up to Sydney for the day, and George met her for a late lunch. George’s mother wore a dark Melbourne dress and asked the waiter for ‘Really cold water’, between remarking on the humidity and the jacarandas—you would never guess that she had lived in Sydney for the first thirty-one years of her life. She bent her head over her handbag, and George found himself looking at a scene from childhood. His mother was on the phone, with the orange wall in the living room behind her. As he watched her, she bent forward from the waist, still holding the receiver. Her hair stood out around her head: George saw a dark-centred golden flower. He couldn’t have been more than six but he understood that his mother was trying to block out the noise around her—he folded like that, too, protecting a book or a toy when ‘Dinner!’ was called—and that this was difficult because the room was full of the loud jazz his father liked to play.
Over the years, George’s mother’s hair had been various colours and lengths, and now it was a soft yellow sunburst again, still with that central dark star. She produced a supermarket receipt from her bag and read from the back of it: ‘Hair Apparent. Do or Dye.’
‘The Head Gardener,’ replied George. ‘Moody Hair.’
They were in the habit of noting down the names of hairdressing salons for each other. His mother said, ‘Also, I saw this in an airport shop: “Stainless steel is immune to rust, discoloration and corrosion. This makes it ideal for men’s jewellery.”’
George and his mother had the same high laugh—hee hee hee—and otherwise didn’t resemble each other at all. The Bonnard was beside her, done up in cardboard and propped on a chair. When George asked what it was like, his mother said, ‘A naked woman and wallpaper. He needed an excuse to paint light.’
The house by the river was spacious and built of bricks covered in white render. It was late spring when George moved in, but the rooms on the ground floor were cold and dark. There were mortuary-white tiles on the floor, and the lights were fluorescent tubes that looked as if they would be fatal to insects. They had to be switched on even in the middle of the day. George remembered that his mother had described the house as ‘Mediterranean’. Ridiculous second-hand visions—a turreted pink villa with terraced gardens, a bowl of red fish at a window—had opened at once in his mind.
He had been back in Sydney for four years and still swam gratefully in its impersonal ease. In Melbourne, where George had lived since he was six, he had wanted to write about modernism in Australian fiction for his PhD. After some difficulty, a professor who would admit to having once read an Australian novel was found. At their first meeting, she handed George a reading list made up of French and German philosophers. When George settled down to read these texts, he discovered something astonishing: the meaning of each word was clear and the meaning of sentences baffled. Insignificant yet crucial words like ‘however’ and ‘which’—words whose meaning was surely beyond dispute—had been deployed in ways that made no sense. It was as unnerving as if George had seen a sunset in his east-facing window, and for a while it was as mesmeric as any disturbance to the order of things. When despair threatened, he transferred his scholarship to a university in Sydney. There, George read novels and books about novels and was wildly happy. He taught a couple of tutorials to supplement his scholarship. Recently, with his thesis more or less out of the way, he had begun to write a novel at night.
A loggia with archways ran along the upper floor on the river side of the house. That was where George ate his meals and sometimes came to sit very early, as the park detached itself from the night. Koels called, and currawongs—the birds who had whistled over his childhood. Fifteen minutes by train from the centre of the city, he lived among trees, birdsong, Greeks. The Greeks, arriving forty years earlier, had seen paradise: cheap real estate, sunlight for their stunted children. Fresh from civil war and starvation, they were too ignorant to grasp what every Australian knew: this was the wrong side of Sydney. Where was the beach?
There were mornings when George left the house at sunrise, crossed the river and turned into a road that ran beside the quarried-out side of a hill. The sandstone was sheer and largely obscured by greenery: giant gum trees fanned against the rock, and native figs, vines, scrub. Brick bungalows cowered at the base of the cliff and skulked on the ridge above—it seemed an affront for which they would all be punished. In the moist, grey summer dawns, George felt that he was walking into a book he had read long ago. The grainy light was a presage. Something was coming—rain, for certain, and a catastrophe.
Opposite the quarry, on the river side of the street, driveways ran down to secretive yards. They belonged to houses that faced the river, with lawns sloping down to the water. A sign warned that the path here was known to flood. But bulky sandstone foundations and verandas strewn with wicker furniture soothed—these houses were merely domestic, nothing like the foreboding on which they turned their backs.
After Pippa moved in, George often came home from his walk to the smell of coffee. They would drink it and eat Vegemite toast on the loggia, and then George would go to bed. Pippa, too, kept irregular hours. Saving to go overseas, she was juggling waitressing with part-time work in a sports store, and George could never be sure of finding her at home. That was fine; the idea was that they would live independently—at least so it had been settled in George’s mind. In her second year at university, Pippa had been in his tutorial on ‘The Fictive Self’: a Pass student whose effortful work George had pitied enough to bump up to a Credit at the last moment. Not long ago, he had run into her near the Reserve Desk at the library. Her hair lay in flat, uneven pieces as if something had been chewing it. As the year drew to a close, a lot of students looked like that: stripey and savage. She had only one essay left to write, ‘in my whole life, ever,’ said Pippa. A peculiar thing happened: she held out a piece of paper, and George feared he would see a note that began, Help! I am being held prisoner…
It was an invitation to a party. Pippa shared a house in Coogee with a tall, ravishing girl called Katrina. When George arrived, Katrina was standing by the drinks table on the side veranda, talking about her cervix. He placed his six-pack in a plastic tub of ice, and Pippa told him a few people’s names. George had left Marrickville on a warm day, but by the time he crossed the city, a southerly had got up. Every door and window in Pippa’s house sto
od open. The dim corridor and all the rooms were full of cold air. In his T-shirt and loose cotton trousers, George moved from one group of people he didn’t know to another, trying to get out of the draught. The girls didn’t seem to notice it. They were Sydney girls, with short skirts and long, bare arms. Recently, George had gone to an opening at a gallery in the company of a visiting lecturer from Berlin. The artist was fashionable, and the gallery’s three rooms were packed. Over dinner, the German woman expressed mild astonishment at the number of sex workers who had attended the opening. ‘Is this typical in Australia?’ she asked. George had to explain that she had misunderstood the significance of shouty make-up, tiny, shiny dresses and jewels so large they looked fake. Eastern suburbs caste marks, they identified the arty, bookish daughters of property developers and CEOs. George was still adjusting to them himself, after Melbourne, where the brainy girls wore stiff, dark clothes like the inmates of nineteenth-century institutions, with here and there an exhibitionist in grey. Pippa had stick limbs, that chewed fringe, a sharp little face. She would have made an excellent orphan: black sacking was all that was needed, and heavy, laced shoes. But she came out of the house in scarlet stilettos and leopard-print satin, and found George on the back patio. He had taken refuge there, in the lee of the kitchen door.
Ashamed to mention cold to this waif, George conjured a headache. Pippa offered Tiger Balm and the use of her room. The windows there were open: Katrina could be heard describing a minor surgical procedure on her ovaries. But when George shut the door and lay down, he was out of the wind at last. A long painting, purple and blue swirls, hung on the wall facing Pippa’s bed—George closed his eyes at once. Long ago, his mother had been a painter. A few survivors from that era—severe, geometric abstractions—could be seen in her flat in Melbourne, but for a long time now her involvement with art had been confined to the upmarket school where she taught.
The Life to Come Page 1