- It's December 1991 and our Melbourne born narrator, Edward, returns from London where he had been living for a few years with his wife Gertrude, who has just died from an overdose. They were painters and drug addicts. Besides bringing her ashes with him back to her family for her burial, he hides in the urn some heroin and pills. They and their friends were lowlifes, the lot of them.
- Despite having read Cairo, Womersley's previous novel featuring Edward and Gertrude, and enjoying it immensely, it took me quite a while to warm to them again. Junkies, who writes about them these days?
- As the novel develops, however, Edward becomes, despite his many faults, extremely likeable again. Of course he now has your standard cliched anti-Australian views of a returnee from London:
The place was like a country town; its people were ugly, unsophisticated, dull, fat, fearful...How much better it would have been if the country had been invaded by the French or the Spanish instead of those dull English Protestants with their awful food and lousy clothes, their pious censoriousness. Then we might have been a better dressed and more imaginative people. We might have nursed someone brilliant who could invent something to be proud of, more than the Hills hoist and a brand of football that no one else in the world played or took the slightest notice of....Horseracing, gambling, digging valuable rocks from the ground, barbecues, slaughtering the Indigenous people and sitting on the beach reading trash like The Thorn Birds. What a legacy.
- The escape to London didn’t work. It brought new challenges they couldn’t meet. Their aspirations as artists went unrealised. The easy paths they were sucked into - scams, theft, partying, drugs - led to so much personal pain. And they had no family support. Art, politics, literature - what had they done for me…was a collection of experiences the same as an actual life?...We had pretty much made ourselves unemployable; it was intrinsic to the artistic mission.
- What I most loved about this novel were the blistering critiques of contemporary art, gentrification, and blokey Australia generally. Like this:
Once upon a time, artists were society's outsiders, its renegades; we were not invited to the respectable parties. But all of that had changed. Now artists longed to be absorbed as quickly as possible into the art-industrial complex. Art had become a vehicle for some sort of celebrity. Perhaps it had been that way for ages. Andy Warhol had a lot to answer for. What a load of shit.
Brunswick Street seemed a lot busier than when I'd last been here, five years ago. It was the weekend. The footpaths thronged with tourists from the suburbs looking for brunch venues. I navigated past lovers wandering along hand in hand, groups of laughing friends, mothers and daughters. The suburb was changing. Its quirk was becoming commodified and very soon the worst sorts of people - real estate agents, corporate types who worked in marketing, Dire Straits fans - would want to live here. And then it would all be over.
- The novel is beautifully written, with insight and empathy. It looks into human beings, beyond the surface. Edward is a portrait of a loving, sensitive, insightful loser. For reasons which were unclear to me - something to do with artistic integrity or fear or plain old snobbery - I had always distanced myself from the ordinary world, but had in the process make of myself an alien.
- After a pivotal meeting with his drug dealer in the The Diplomat hotel, he returns to his small and ugly room in the hostel, pessimistic and despairing, reflecting on Gertrude and her wonderful beauty and talent.
- Finally, for readers who've spent some time in London, this delicious para will ring true:
We ducked into a greasy-spoon cafe for a sit-down and a cup of tea. The place was warm, packed with locals eating breakfast and gossiping. We managed to snag a recently vacated table in the window. The diner smelled pleasantly of crispy bacon and cigarette smoke. I had always enjoyed these places; they were like a neighbour's friendly and chaotic kitchen, invariably noisy with clatter and sizzle. The women working there always called you 'love', like they were your mum or aunt, and the food was generally awful, but in a glorious, delicious way. Bacon and eggs with chips and white bread and baked beans from a tin. Kippers, mugs of milky tea, sausages. Anything edible - the toast, even the bloody Mars Bars - could be deep-fried on request. You just had to avoid the coffee at all costs. It was always better to stick to the national beverage - tea - in the UK.
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