Carl Harrison-Ford reviews three first novels

The Last Time I Saw Mother by Arlene J. Chai Random House Australia, $14.95 pb How do you get a first novel up and running? Random House has done so with a show of faith unusual amongst Australian publishers ... and faith can move mountains of books. The Last Time I Saw Mother (Random House Australia, $14.95 pb) is handsomely produced and has an equally handsome print run of 20,000. It’s been sold into the shops in numbers and its author – Manila-born Sydney-based copywriter, Arlene J. Chai – has had her name linked with Amy Tan and Jung Chang. The back cover has a brisk encomium from Bryce Courtenay, who encouraged her to write. Effective marketing indeed, although one reviewer has commented on an element of cultural cringe. Beneath its promotion, the first thing to note is that Chai lacks the swallowed-a-thesaurus tonality of her mentor Courtenay. So far so good. At times, however, Mother would have benefited from some adjectival sabre-rattling. At its core, Chai’s novel is a family melodrama. Now living in Sydney and trial-separated from her husband Jamie, Caridad is summoned back to Manila by her ‘Mama’, who reveals that she is not her mother at all. Caridad is the youngest child of ‘Mama’ Thelma’s poor sister Emma, given up to the austere and barren Thelma for reasons of penury. The family’s story is told by these three and by Caridad’s real sister, Ligaya. To say this so baldly is not to spill the beans to prospective readers. Mother’s strongest revelations are subtler than that. Primarily we have Caridad’s discovery of her life. No story could better carry such a theme, though Chai reaches out beyond that with New Agey self-help rhetoric: I have been given a gift. The gift of my past. And with it has come a lesson. I have learned that the telling of the truth – the act – is where the answer lies. It is what I need to do in my own life. It is no easy thing to do. It is an act of courage. Secondly, there is the social and family history that shows how the Caridad barter could take place. And it is here that I found the novel most affecting. Tableaux they may be but the early days of Thelma’s marriage, Ligaya’s forfeiting of her artistic spirit (she is in fact more marginalised emotionally than Caridad), acts of kindness from a lonely Japanese officer during the occupation, and sometimes sharp pinpointing of social stratification and superstition in the unhomogenised Chinese-Spanish-Filipino melting pot, show where Chai’s potential as a writer is most firmly lodged. The problem, though, is that these elements don’t cohere, and Mother lacks structural and dramatic focus. The narrative slabs are sometimes long – two of them take half the book – and tend to be separate rather than interacting entities. Coupled with this is an evenness of tone that is sometimes bland and seldom sonorous. The stories and the narrators’ voices rarely intersect. They certainly don’t burn ‘with a woman’s fierce love’, as Courtenay asserts. Despite the strength inherent in the story and its dramatic potential, the tone of the storytelling comes across as an unsuccessful attempt at dispassionate gravity ... though I am sure this is not what was intended. Still, sales will doubtless make nonsense of my strictures, as The Last Time I Saw Mothertugs at bittersweet heartstrings. Chai can certainly come up with a strong storyline and her skills are more than hinted at. I hope her next novel can bring them to a stronger dramatic realisation. Just A Prostitute by Marianne Wood UQP, $14.95 pb Just A Prostitute (UQP, $14.95 pb) is also a first novel, though it reads like fictionalised research and its status is ambiguous. Marianne Wood’s narrator – we never learn her real name but she works as Toni and, later, Paula – works the brothels, strip joints, and streets of Melbourne and Kings Cross, hating her work, doing drugs only occasionally but boozing a lot. There is a relationship with a fellow prostitute, Lazelle; her other associates, straight and gay, are a petty crew. The bulk of the book is set between 1978 and 1981, then there is an apparently arbitrary jump to 1993, by which time she is seeing a psychologist whose counselling she largely ignores. Mind you, she ignores a lot. The lifestyle described is an unremittingly depressing one but Toni/Paula feels totally alienated from what she describes as the real world – ‘which isn’t all that bad. I have never felt enthusiastic about that world’. That, presumably, is why we never discover her given name and why she eschews the bureaucratically correct terminology or euphemism many prostitutes have adopted: ‘I am not a sex industry worker, I am a prostitute. They are not clientele, they are mugs’ As a freestanding character, Toni/Paula is a scattered voice. There are many hints that she will come through with some childhood revelation that never materialises. The twelve-year jump in testimony is never explained. Nor is it clear why the mugs are not described in any detail until the last chapter. A non&shy;professional sexual encounter with Lazelle reads: ‘My fingers curl, straighten, push against the very heart of the ocean. And I’m lost in the deep silence that wants and rejects me, that pulls me in further.’ Nothing so much as Letters to Penthouse Newspeak, or its sapphist equivalent. Toni/Paula’s voice is nowhere else so tidal. Whether fiction or faction, Just A Prostitute is interesting and possibly informative but ragged. The Last Real Cirkus by Bridie Bottari Angus & Robertson, $16.95 pb Bridie Bottari’s novel, The Last Real Cirkus (Angus & Robertson, $16.95 pb) has some incipient flair to it, but it’s well hidden. A satirical novel set in 2020, or ‘about a minute and a half into the future’ as the blurb puts it, most of its satirical barbs are so fixedly in the present the novel is set about a minute and a half in the past even as I type. Entertainment is institutionalised; the mentally disturbed are freed from their institutions and some have turned both feral and dangerous; radical feminists have turned into bovver boys and dress as some of them did a decade ago; politicians are manipulative in instantly recognisable ways. Through this world traipses the MirrorImage Cirkus run by brothers whose family have been big-toppers since 1918. Maintained by certain branches of the bureaucracy, they are hounded by others. There are petty jealousies, usually overwhelmed by camaraderie (especially when the chips are down), and a remarkably routine set of characters – the Joker and his goat Lorenzo, trapeze artists, animal trainers, magicians, the larger than life Custard Annie ... even a rude chimpanzee. Refreshing but unexceptional circus fare. Still circuses supplement the staff of life, as Juvenal noted, and Bottari’s novel has its jolly moments and its tensions. The trouble is she’s forgotten to turn them into a story. A huge proportion of The Last Real Cirkus is taken up with background briefing and explanatory asides, many of them blocked in by a quick alliteration – ‘fucked by fiscal foundering’, ‘lammed by liberationists’, ‘conspicuous consumers’, and ‘Propitiating Priapus’ all come from page nine – and a scatter of single entendres. The ‘high-wire struggle between good and evil’ promised by the blurb falters and staggers. Cirkus is 155 pages of material that progresses haphazardly, neither sweeping satire nor post-modernist mélange. With the vision behind it – a painting, apparently – unrealised, it is a novel without a net.

Carl Harrison-Ford

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