"Turn the page. Begin another story. For I have worn down. Exhausted by the telling. It wears me down. The telling of it has wearied me. My mouth opens to speak and there are no words. Nor are there the sounds of any description."

During the chaos of World War II, (real-life) Australian Prime Minister John Curtin is deposed when one of the independent MPs in Parliament dies, thus depriving Curtin of his slender majority. As the narrative diverges from our reality (the independent MPs are historical, but the death is fictional), the new Prime Minister reveals himself to be far-right nationalist who sets about making a truce with the Japanese, a truce that involves ceding vast swathes of the country over to them. All manner of horrors - death camps, ghettos to imprison artists, nationwide repression - follow. Over the following four years, we follow the lives of numerous characters, but primarily two. Missy Cunningham, a woman living in Melbourne's artistic community, and Telford, a civil servant installed at the Prime Minister's mansion in country Victoria. Telford is drawn into an amateur investigation when the deceased MP's widow approaches him, convinced her husband's death was not accidental.

I'm trying to resist just calling this novel "overlong and inane", because that's not appropriate for a reviewer of my stature. Yet I can find very little to recommend it. In the minds of its supporters, N is a post-modern masterpiece. And certainly, it resembles such. Clocking in at 600 oversized pages, Scott flirts with magical realism (Melbourne's Port Phillip Bay mysteriously retreats one day, leaving 2000 square kilometres of sand and dead fish), Zola-esque symbolism (an Australian soldier and then a Japanese one are pitched against a kangaroo in a boxing ring), allegories of Fascism (the Prime Minister recalls Ancient Rome by re-enacting WWI battles at the MCG for a screaming mob, giving the "Australians" real bullets and the "Turks" blanks), intertextuality (during a picnic at Hanging Rock, the characters hear the "mirthless" laughter of seemingly spectral girls), generic ambiguity (a writer whose scripts turn out to be visions of the future, and a hard-boiled style detective narrative, butting up against a realist war drama), allusions to contemporary politics (politicians complaining that refugee advocates are using the "misleading term 'children'" to "cloud the issue of filthy foreigners"), and playful mimicry (an unexpected sequence takes us inside the head of an otherwise minor child character, whose narrative is written in a style fondly recalling Dickens' David Copperfield). Yet if I were honest, the clash of styles merely feels arch. It does not mesh, but it also rarely feels like Scott has set out to create a dissonant patchwork.

In the interests of time, I have narrowed down my complaints to the core essentials. First is a problem that perhaps Scott had no way of winning. With rare exceptions, we see the events of this monstrous War through the eyes of bystanders. Missy, in Melbourne, is away from most of the chaos, and so is relying upon second- and third-hand knowledge. Telford and some of the supporting cast are more intimately linked, but none of them has a broad view of the situation. This feels deliberate, recreating the "fog of war" that we feel even now, in a 21st century where malevolent political interests are everywhere. The horror of what is happening in N is precisely that any good Australian should be opposed to it, but the average citizen has been emotionally manipulated by evil politicians and media barons, while also being denied the evidence to decide for themselves. Yet, in creating this framework, Scott denies himself the ability to create a coherent narrative. This is 600 pages of people guessing at what might be happening, concluding in an unsatisfying denouement that seems to be determined to return things to established history, so as not to cause any messy questions. In a different kind of alternate history novel, in which we the reader are equally unaware of what the clues mean (see, for example, Claire G. Coleman's utterly fantastic [b:The Old Lie|44434612|The Old Lie|Claire G. Coleman|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1552640712l/44434612._SY75_.jpg|69002313]), this kind of structure can be a great success. Yet, eighty years after the War, any reader in the West only needs to hear phrases like "people being rounded up in trucks", "elections postponed", "enemy of the state", and our cultural history provides entire volumes of information. When the characters are actively behind the reader in terms of knowledge, your story will only work if you're Columbo!

Which leads to the next issue: it's 600 pages long. I keep saying this, but frankly if you're going to write a gorilla of a novel, you have to have a gorilla of an idea. And Scott simply does not. Is Cole's widow correct that he was murdered to precipitate a political crisis that would allow the far-right to take over? Guess what, it really doesn't matter! Because even if Telford is able to prove it, what will it change? Will the War suddenly come to an end. Will the Japanese profusely apologise and retreat? "Oh, I'm so sorry, I didn't realise that one accidental death three years ago had been a murder. Our expansionist plans were built on a lie. How shameful!" Of course they won't. And if Telford discovers Cole's death was an accident? That life is actually just an endless slew of ironies? Well, we'll all learn a valuable lesson, but it will be a lesson we could have enjoyed in a much more concise format.

Now, of course, it is not a reviewer's job to ask a novel be shorter, or less dense, or more direct. It is their job to analyse what the author was trying to do, and determine if they achieved it. And here is where I must confess my main complaint: N is forever torn between being an experimental novel and being a bog-standard epic. I mentioned the David Copperfield parody, which is one of the most clever sections herein. And these literature imitations appear relatively frequently: letters smuggled out of POW camps, scripts discovered in various formats and drafts, transcripts from political speeches. If Scott had chosen to write the entire novel in this style, perhaps we could talk. Instead, he retreats from innovation just as often, reluctant to challenge literary norms on a grand scale. At the same time, these more standard entries often fall over themselves to be self-consciously literary, drawing attention to the failings of the narrators but without rewarding us in turn.

One conversation stood out to me, of which I recreate here only a couple of lines:

"I was wondering", Hennigsen began, "whether somewhere amongst all your equipment you have anything which might approximate the uses of a crowbar?"
"Is it a crowbar you're looking for?", the gardener asked.
"A crowbar, or some other implement which might reasonably be harnessed to do the usual work of a crowbar".

If one is attempting to write a B-Grade Wildean takedown of contorted language, there's something to that. But this kind of chatter is deployed haphazardly, often amidst pages of generic prose, to the point where this reader was driven to despair trying to keep my balance while deciphering which parts of the prose were deliberately off-kilter, and which accidentally so. I could accept 600 pages of remarkable prose. I could also accept 600 pages of adequately but cumulatively brilliant writing. This is neither. (In Scott's closing notes, outrageously, he indicates that another sizable chunk was removed "for reasons of overall length"(!) and published in a literary journal as a standalone piece instead.)

As I ran down the clock on N, I began to wonder what it was all for. As we discover that the motivations for the coup were the usual motley crew of capitalists and crazies, why did we take this journey? And then Scott surprised me. The final few pages are set in 2001, during the (real) "children overboard" scandal, a series of appalling lies by political conservatives targeted at asylum seekers, which for many Australians marks the beginning of 20 years of very public and very ugly policies on turning away refugees from Australia's shores. Now, you'll get no dispute from me that my country's approach to refugees is inhumane, barbaric, and unarguably illegal. Perhaps it is worth reiterating in literary format that fear of the "other", fear of those foreigners coming and taking our land has been a crucial part of the Australian psyche since the year 1788, when my ancestors... came and took other people's land. (Yeah, it's never been an internally logical argument.) Still, I struggle to believe that this was the best method of making that claim. 595 pages of prologue to a cutting jibe at a government that had been out of office for 7 years by the time this book was even published? Odd. Most odd.

I was born in 1987. Scott was born in 1948. In neither of our lifetimes has there been a more perilous precipice for Western democracy than the point at which we now stand in 2020. On that, I suspect he and I agree. There is a fight which every ethical human must join to protect our institutions and conventions from populists and savages, while at the same time radically restructuring them to eliminate the long-held biases and inequalities which - when left unchecked - will devolve into the abhorrent sentiments expressed during WWII and, worryingly, in many parts of the Western world today. Sadly, N seems to be trying to reiterate that fact, rather than provide a solution. And at 600 pages, that's an exorbitant demand on the reader's patience.… (plus d'informations)

Signalé

therebelprince | 1 autre critique | Apr 21, 2024 |

Blair:A Novel par Scott John

This is very recognisable as John's first novel. It's well written and for me it was fun recognising the confabulation of various characteristics of people we've known over the years appearing even larger than life in fiction.

Signalé

livrecache | Dec 6, 2006 |

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