No Place like Home

‘Why, you couldn’t write a story that happened nowhere,’ remarks Eudora Welty in her Paris Review interview of 1972. For Australian author Peter Temple, the first question when starting a new novel is: where will this happen? And, of course, they are both quite right. Everything happens somewhere, whether you like it or not. A setting can be a country or city, naturally, but that isn’t where it ends; there are bedrooms, sporting fields, kitchens, hallways, cars, waiting rooms and, finally, the very chambers of characters’ hearts. A setting is not merely a random place where people meet and action happens: the setting is intrinsic to that action. Our world lives in us as much as we live in it, and it is part of the fiction writer’s task to conjure it.

A novel consists of many things working seamlessly together and place is as crucial as voice, character and story to the overall success of a work of fiction. For me the setting for a work of fiction I am creating makes itself known in tandem with the characters and story; the setting effectively becomes a character in its own right. It’s difficult, for example, to imagine To Kill a Mockingbird, with its simmering brew of racism and innocence, being set anywhere else, in any other time. Likewise Crime and Punishment, Monkey Grip and On the Road are tied to their time and place. A setting doesn’t have to be reality, however: it may be merely a plausible variation of what we take for reality. Ask Dante, Samuel Beckett, Margaret Attwood, Ursula K. Le Guin, Mervyn Peake or J.G. Ballard, all of whom have conjured worlds from thin air. Fiction is to reality what memory is to an actual event; it’s recognisable if you squint, but is often merely a starting point for something substantially different.

Imagine for a minute that you arrive for work on Monday morning. There’s the usual hubbub of football talk. The annoying bloke from marketing goes on about how much he drank on Saturday night, another about her daughter’s tennis final. You wait impatiently for your computer to boot up. But then a weird thing happens. The woman who occupies the desk beside you, Fiona, tells you in a soft voice how she was kicked in the face on Saturday night and, as if you doubt her (which you might—after all, she seems so meek and mild, sort of mousy; nice, but uninteresting), she tilts her head back to better show her left cheek, which now sports a luscious blue-green bruise.

‘Wow,’ you say, genuinely shocked. ‘Where on earth did that happen?’

Where on earth indeed.

We’ll get back to Fiona later.

*

I was born and bred in Melbourne and there are qualities of that city and its environs that infect my writing, for better or worse. Like thousands of other boys in the suburbs, what I wanted most in the world was to be a VFL/AFL footballer. One of my most regular fantasies as I trotted around the back yard with my Sherrin would be that of finding some space in the forward pocket near the old chook shed, with only two minutes left in the grand final, Hawthorn down to Collingwood by five points. The ground is soggy and there is the threat of more rain. Streamers and confetti blow across the forward pocket. The ball is kicked into the forward line but not even Peter Knights can mark it. It spills clear. Somehow, I gather it on the run, break a tackle, weave through a pack, brush off Rene Kink with a well-timed Don’t Argue, snap and … goal. The crowd goes absolutely berserk. Lou Richards coins a new and unique phrase in my honour. Hawthorn wins, naturally. Cheering, fade to black.

I was there the day Leigh Matthews ran into a point post and snapped it; I remember Malcolm Blight missing a kick at goal from point-blank range at Arden Street Oval in driving rain; the 1977 grand final replay between North Melbourne and Collingwood. The damp crunch of autumn leaves, the smell of back-yard incinerators, a neighbour’s dog barking. But I also remember encountering The Human Factor for the first time, sitting on the carpet, back against the bookcase, not really understanding what was happening. Espionage, loyalty, suburbia? There was also My Family and Other Animals, Great Expectations, Treasure Island, The World according to Garp. For a long time I could recall, almost word for word, the opening passage of To Kill a Mockingbird. At the same time, in my early teens, I discovered T.S. Eliot’s Preludes, The Outsiders, Wuthering Heights, All Quiet on the Western Front, Clockwork Orange. No-one ever stopped me from reading anything. The leap from football to literature is perhaps not so dramatic. Consider Ted Hopkins, the hero of Carlton’s 1970 stunning grand final win over Collingwood, who played one more game before giving it away to write poetry and become a publisher.

*

In my first novel, The Low Road (Scribe, 2007), I was hoping to evoke in the reader an emotional response similar to that which other works of art have inspired in me. Some of these works I employed as a sort of background hum when writing the book: there was Neil Young’s soundtrack to the film Dead Man; the paintings of Edward Hopper; Cat Power’s cover version of the song ‘Troubled Waters’; the urban streetscapes of photographer Bill Henson; the 1967 Jean-Pierrre Melville film Le Samourai; Michael Ondaatje’s The Collected Works of Billy the Kid; Raskolnikov’s interior hell; James Ellroy’s sudden violence. Ethereal things, all of them, but there was also something far more concrete and yet, paradoxically, even more elusive.

It might sound odd in view of the lack of exact setting for The Low Road, but what I wanted most of all was to give texture to the exquisite melancholy of a Melbourne mid-winter afternoon, when your football team has lost by five points in the dying moments of the game. The afternoon light is failing fast; the trees are bare of foliage; there is the stink of wet earth; the distinct possibility of beery violence among the rabble leaving the stadium; the flavour of opportunity gone missing. Grown men are swearing. Their kids become meek and mild, suddenly afraid of their fathers, afraid for their mothers waiting at home. If only Brereton marked that kick deep in the last quarter. He should’ve hung on to it. Watchit mate. Hey! Watch where you’re going.

On one such day, one of The Low Road characters, Josef, an ageing gangster already deep in his personal winter, thinks it might be the kind of afternoon when people should be returning home to warm houses and the smell of freshly bathed infants. Josef’s thoughts are freighted with the knowledge that he is by now—after all he has done in his violent life—forever excluded from such domestic comforts. Home is a foreign place and for him there is no next year, as the sporting cliché goes; today is all he has and it really isn’t much of a place to be.

The Low Road is not set in any specific time or place. No towns or countries are named and there is no signpost that might anchor the action historically. The novel follows three men moving through an underworld in not only a social and legal sense but also in a mythical one. It’s an anywhere, rather than a nowhere. Tying it to a particular city would have made writing it far easier because it would have made available to me the shorthand that the mention of a specific place enables. I felt, however, that it would have detracted from the liminal, quasi-supernatural quality of the place I was attempting to evoke, rather than adding to it. Paradoxically, such vagueness about setting meant working harder to describe the surrounds in which the action occurs, because precision is part of the art of fiction:

The suburbs that fringe every city of a certain size look pretty much the same. Sites of halfway use. Places of failure and suspicion and neglect. Ribbons of highway unravelling through wet suburbs. The bus shelter with a scuffle of soft-drink cans beneath wire seats and the stink of domestic misfortune. There’s always an abandoned rail yard with rusted segments of track lying thickly in the long, damp grass. The rotunda of a local park where, once upon a time, a kid was raped by a bunch of other kids.

Readers need to see where the action happens, to site it somehow within their own imagination. And yet, for me, The Low Road was always set in Melbourne and its surrounds. I know the exact St Kilda apartment block where the character of Lee lives, the strip of road along which the seedy Parkview Motel is situated, the Victorian country town where the characters finish up and meet their various ends. You’re unlikely, however, to find The Low Road’s version of Melbourne included in marketing campaigns featuring an elegant woman rolling an oversized ball of red wool down gentrified alleyways, or grinning arty types sipping coffee after their Pilates class. Up north they refer to Melbourne as Bleak City, as if it is an insult.

*

My second novel, Bereft, is different to The Low Road in many respects, not least of which is that it is rooted in a more concrete time and place. Bereft is set in a fictional NSW country town called Flint, immediately after the Second World War. It is February 1919. The world is full of physically and emotionally maimed men returning home. Summoned by a mysterious message from a spirit medium, a soldier called Quinn Walker returns to Flint where he grew up but which he has not visited for ten years, since he fled after being falsely accused of the murder of his beloved younger sister, Sarah. Unable to make his presence known, he hides out in the hills surrounding Flint. There he meets a young girl called Sadie Fox, whom he comes to believe is inhabited by the spirit of his murdered sister. This enigmatic creature helps Quinn seek justice for his sister’s murder and encourages him to take revenge on the man responsible for raping and killing Sarah all those years before. If there is a theme, it is about loss and longing, of the ability or otherwise of the grief-stricken and shell-shocked to imagine those they have lost back into their lives. Quinn’s mother says to him of poor Sarah: ‘Do you think it might be possible to will someone back to life, with nothing but love?’

I wrote Bereft while living in Sydney for a period of several years and longing for Melbourne. In this way, the town of my birth made itself felt by its absence. As has often been noted in regard to the Victorians’ denial of sex, to hide something from view does not erase it; it can, perversely, serve to make its presence even more keenly felt. The same might be said of the dead, who perhaps have a habit of making themselves known, even when they are long gone. ‘Trick or treat,’ the children say in the North American tradition of Halloween and the implication is clear: appease us or we will make mischief.

For Bereft, the setting was crucial. I needed a place and a time in which people might have more readily believed in spirits, a period in which those newly killed worldwide in the war far outnumbered the population of Australia. I also needed a background in which the drawing forth of such spirits resonated psychologically. The period of the First World War saw a surge of interest in séances in Europe and Britain and it’s not hard to understand why; the new-fangled industrial war had devastated parts of France and killed tens of millions of soldiers and civilians. In addition, the Spanish flu pandemic was stealthily claiming millions more lives and tuberculosis continued to kill returned soldiers for many years to come. Religion was waning as a force in people’s lives and the state offered little more than nationalist jingoism as a panacea for those who had lost their sons and fathers and brothers and uncles in horrendous ways. As one of the characters of Bereft notes: there is not even a word in the language for one who has lost a child—there is no category of mourning, as with a widow, a widower, an orphan. Enter the phenomenon of spiritualism, a sort of halfway house between religion, science, the occult and twentieth-century rationalism.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of the hyper-rational detective Sherlock Holmes, was spiritualism’s greatest ambassador and, in between writing dozens of mystery stories, found time to publish The Case for Spirit Photography in 1922. The famous doctor was himself beset by grief: he had lost his first wife early in the century; then lost his son Kingsley and brother Innes as a result of injuries sustained in the Great War. Doyle toured Australia in 1920 and 1921 and lectured to more than 50,000 people on spiritualism and spirit photography, in which photographs showed up not only the portrait of the sitter but also a hovering image of the person the man or woman was mourning. The war dead were not completely gone—a thought that no doubt provided comfort for the countless grieving widows, widowers and orphans scattered across the globe. The story of Bereft, then, is moored explicitly in the early part of the twentieth century, during a period of unprecedented global mourning.

*

Now, back to work, Monday morning. Remember Fiona? You asked her where she was when she was kicked in the face over the weekend?

‘Oh,’ she says with a slightly embarrassed air. ‘Just down the road from my house.’

‘God, that’s terrible.’

She shrugs, looks around, then beckons you in, obviously preparing to impart something highly confidential. Was she raped? Is her husband beating her, perhaps? You’ve heard about these women, the ones who are attracted to crazed men. You sense a blunt thrill of anticipation at the prospect of being the valued recipient of some controversial information, and already you are debating with yourself how you might help.

‘Well,’ she says. ‘It was actually at my local gym.’

‘Oh?’

She looks around again. ‘Yeah. I’ve taken up kick-boxing and I had my first bout on the weekend. I got beaten quite badly. TKO.’ And Fiona touches the sullen bruise with a kind of fondness. ‘But I’ll get better. I’ve only been doing it for a little while. I’m gonna get that bitch back one day.’

‘I see,’ you say, mystified and a little disappointed. That clears it up, then. By now your computer has come to life. You scuttle back to your desk. It’s time to get to work.