Vanishing Points by Thea Astley

Draw an outline of the Cape York Peninsula, far north Queensland. Just a rough one. An isosceles triangle, more or less. Now draw its mirror image away from the baseline. Imagine it in 3-0. Two cones. Two cyclones joined, spinning in opposite directions. Male and female vortices balancing each other, consuming each other. That’s it. Two novellas making a novel: Thea Astley’s brilliant Vanishing Points. In ‘The Genteel Poverty Bus Company’, the first novella in Vanishing Points, Astley tells the story of Mac Hope, a disillusioned Queensland university English lecturer with a head full of the Romantics and the American transcendentalists. Mac drops out as a protest against academia, politics, the electronic society and humanity in general. He starts a tour bus company and treats patrons to bucketing rides through the north Queensland landscape to the accompaniment of barrages of Mozart on the bus tape deck. Advertised as trendy, snobbish and cheap, the venture fails. Too much of a cultural assault, the patrons complain. Mac tries again to put ‘quality’ into his life. This time he ‘does a Thoreau’. Indulging his mania for solitude and his ‘island lust’, he buys a small island in the Whitsundays. It is an ‘excursion into silence’, a quest for peace undertaken by a man who doesn’t need anyone, who is happy to reject the world and prove to himself that he can survive. He simply wants nothing – no mates, no materialism, no interference. He finds that nothing is the hardest thing to find. Firstly, through the maze-like interweaving of stories past and present, Mac’s solitude is crowded with memories of the last tour taken by his Genteel Poverty Bus Company. He suffers guilt over the various personal disasters sustained by the travellers under his care and triggered by ‘the Australian experience’, as he called the tour to the tip of the Cape and back. As they relive (mostly in imagination) aspects of early settlement (massacre of Aborigines), colonial times (Palmer River goldrush) and outback life (bush dances), their group falls apart. ‘The Australian experience’ produces perhaps some enhancement of self-knowledge for the tourists, but mainly disorientation and conflict. The Stagers, an American couple, find the experience too much for their marriage. They leave the group, headed for a divorce. Estelle, hunting the suppressed Aboriginal branch in her family tree, is another emotional casualty. Beryl, a tourist along the branch-roads of her sexuality, causes a pile-up. And sick, disillusioned Gamble, a music student looking for a saviour, finds it in the unwilling Mac. In this maze of personal histories, Mac finds himself called upon to provide more than the driving and the classical music tapes. He is asked for emotional support, which is something the man cannot give. Also, he is losing money. He retreats to his island and, searching his spiritual self, creates a maze out of the rainforest there. When his maze is finished, with its centre at the top of the island’s single hill, he discovers two monsters – the world (in the form of the island next door) and himself. It takes him a while to realise that the two monsters are in fact one. Astley’s novella has all the monumental dimensions of Melville’s short stories. It is a difficult thing for a male reviewer to admit, but Astley knows perfectly the self-centredness, meanness, and frightful insecurity of the male spirit. She also knows that when a man strips himself down to a single principle he finds I want, which is to say survival by aggression and tragedy. At base, the man cannot give, or give in. But you can’t be Robinson Crusoe these days. The footsteps of progress and development soon appear on the beach. The ‘furious pace of twentieth century greed’ catches up to Mac. His potential utopia becomes hell when a tourist resort is established on the island next door. His solitude is shattered by late night rock’n’roll revelry. In retaliation he sets up a massive speaker system on his hilltop and replies with barrages of Wagner. It is greed for solitude versus greed for money. The developer and resort owner, a man called Truscott, also does not give in. He tries unsuccessfully to buy Mac out, has him invaded and beaten up, burns down his crude house and ruins his boat. In his own greed, aggression, prejudice and anger at the system, Mac refuses to budge. But what Mac does finally accept at the centre of his spiritual maze is ‘the sheer bloody humanness of people’, where humanness equals monstrous greed. At the end, after the confrontations in the maze, after saving his disciple Gamble (by showing him the road to nowhere -the satisfaction of drifting-which is the road away from progress and development) and being saved by him, Mac confronts the developer Truscott who delivers the ultimate thrust in the battle. ‘Christ, you’re an amateur’, Truscott says. In the world of the ‘professionals’ who are fucking up the rest of the world, this is the quintessential insult. For Mac, it is a small victory. Mac takes to his repaired boat and ‘drives East’, vanishing into the Pacific, materially unprepared but spiritually in triumph. Did he win or lose? Winning solitude and probably death, did he win against the world, against himself? It makes one angry to accept that he can only win this way. Is the attainment of tragic nobility a victory these days? The reader enters the second novella, ‘Inventing the Weather’, not knowing that s /he is in another part of the same story maze depicted in ‘The Genteel Poverty Bus Company’. Gradually it dawns that the new central character, Julie, is the wife of the developer Truscott. Her story starts more or less at the time when her husband was contemplating the development of the island resort next door to Mac (and testing the beach as a site for dalliance with his current secretary). Julie Truscott is ‘a bored housewife and mother of three’ – member of the poolside suntan set, the wives of the white shoe brigade – suffering the full family catastrophe in suburban Sugarville. Searingly cynical and perceptive, hers is the tough, hurt female voice of a north Queensland Dorothy Parker character. She shocks her adulterous husband, who is screwing up beautiful tracts of land as fast as he screws his secretaries, by moving out on him just as he is about to move out on her. She abandons him and the kids, and gets a job with a newspaper up north in Townsville. The editor, Baxter, is an old boyfriend from her young journalist days. Julie escapes the dead end of her drab, privileged middle-class lifestyle, but her liberation leads only to wandering in other, equally difficult parts of the maze which is family. When she tries to thread her way back, seeking recognition from her kids, wanting to abduct them, she finds they don’t want her. They are having too much fun with the glitzy computers and sound systems, and the super-efficient Swedish housekeeper, that their father has installed. All Julie has to offer them are straitened circumstances and homespun pleasures. She is redundant. Julie interprets her emotional turmoil as a cyclone, a personal traumatic weather pattern she cannot escape. Then (in an actual cyclone?) she meets two nuns, Sisters Aloysius and Tancred. They are rebels against church and society, rich in spiritual wealth, youthful and vital well after normal retirement age. They provide a calm centre to Julie’s personal cyclone. At Bukki Bay towards the tip of Cape York, where the nuns have established (without government or church help) a little shanty mission station for Murri people, perched beside a maze of coastal rainforest, Julie finds a fragile peace at the eye of the world’s storm. The nuns’ lifestyle is of the saintly variety which gives all to others and is its own reward. At the centre of this different type of coastal development, this female-built mission project, is love not greed. Having sought within herself for the vanishing point where all perspectives, oppositions and prejudices merge – beyond selfishness, beyond progress, beyond sex differences, beyond cultural paradigms – Julie discovers the true centre of the family maze, not inhabited by the male capacity for greed but by the female capacity for love. Stripped down to a single principle, the woman finds I give, which is to say survival by service and caring. Is this discovery a victory? Julie sees that the consequences for her own non-religious centre remain ambiguous. Does destiny equal only death plus children? Only perpetuation? In her quest, Julie moves from being one of the women who ... must always be the captured skin, cured and turned into a rug on the dining-room floor to being ... new-peeled to receive other imprints ... [able to] embrace a wholeness of being never known before. Skinned to receive. Instead of seeking her identity in the maze of superficial selves provided by external perspectives, she is redirected into the maze of inner selves. This is a victory of sorts. Additionally, her minor triumph (perhaps) occurs at the end when Truscott visits Bukki Bay with a view to removing her crude utopia and developing a glitzy resort in its place. His fate is a belated victory for Mac from the first novella, but also ironic, since he may, in the end, have been attempting to find the same vanishing point Mac set out for when he ‘drove East’. The two novellas are endlessly interrelated and opposed, the one being the flip-side, the negative, the counterpoint and counterblast to the other. His and hers. Both involve ‘puny fights against the power of money and corrupt political preference’. Both trace quests for calmness, quality and meaning in life. Both are about spiritual purpose and satisfaction. Hers is the more convincing victory. Perhaps.

Nigel Krauth

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