I have found it impossible to continue with this read right now. It is so boring that I literally fall asleep every time I pick it up. My mind is not at its best for focusing right now, so it may not be entirely the fault of the book.

In any event, I will put this one aside, unread, perhaps forever. ( )

Warning: plot spoilers.

When your country has a tiny population, like Australia's, authors often have to symbolize more than one thing. Richardson, for instance, is Australia's Joyce (insofar as she wrote one of the great Australian young person comes of age novel). She is Australia's Eliot; not only did she, like George, give herself a 'man's' name; she also knew far more about 19th century intellectual life than most people of her circle would have known, and put that to good work in her novels. She is Australia's Melville, having written a quasi-symbolic novel about her young nation's growth and, more importantly, its flaws. And she's Australia's Mann, having written the country's great realist novel, and one of its great modernist novels. But Richardson managed to make them two parts of one massive book, The Fortunes of Richard Mahony.

Sadly, Richardson's major novel is not as great as that by those men and women, but 'Richard Mahony' is, I'm fairly sure, unique in world literature. The first volume, 'Australia Felix,' starts out with an astonishing 'proem,' an almost grotesque visual sequence in which men are "ensorcelled--without witchcraft" by the "unholy hunger" for gold. But this is better read as the proem to the novel as a whole. 'Australia Felix' is a standard, enjoyable realist tale of a young migrant, who wins a wife, makes some money, and decides to return home. In volume two, 'The Way Home,' our hero fails in the old world, returns home, and becomes massively wealthy. In 'Ultima Thule', his wealth gone, he slowly goes insane.

If it were only this, the book would be fairly forgettable. But it is also to some degree a portrait of the nation's soul (though Richardson might have been uncomfortable with this reading): deeply ambivalent about its relationship to the old world, with fears of inferiority ('culture cringe'), ambitious but disgusted by ambition, greedy but egalitarian, and so on.

More importantly, Richardson begins the book in a fairly bland, realistic style, but as Mahony becomes more and more unstable, the strong third person narrator loses its grip. We get more stream of consciousness, more free indirect discourse, more ellipses and non sequiturs. Richardson uses modernist tools, but uses them to depict Mahony's madness, or the way he appears to his young son. Whenever we're back with Mahony's sane (and long suffering) wife, Mary, the narrator is strong.

But that madness at the end returns us to the grotesque proem at the mine's face: the nation, more or less founded (on this telling) on the receipts of the gold rush, can't escape the madness that was present at that foundation. This is the history that gave us modernism, and you can't help but feel nostalgic, at the end, for the cliches and clunkiness of the book's opening. But, as Mahony learns (twice!), you can't just go back home as if nothing has happened. ( )

Absolutely wonderful read, 23 Nov. 2012
By
sally tarbox

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This review is from: The Fortunes of Richard Mahony (Penguin Classics) (Paperback)
Wonderful book set in mid 1800s Ballarat, Australia. The eponymous character is - at the start - in his late 20s, an Irish doctor who has come out to seek his fortune, and has abandoned his profession to run a - not particularly successful - store.
Matrimony comes quite early on when he marries the much younger Mary. Her gentle encouragement prompts him to resume his medical career and gradually they move up in the world. Yet his life is never his own, with her friends and family coming to stay or needing help. And while loving, Mary fails to fully understand her husband:
'He had no talent for friendship, and he knew it; indeed, he would even invert the thing, and say bluntly that his nature had a twist in it which directly hindered friendship...Sometimes he felt like a hungry man looking on at a banquet, of which no one invited him to partake because he had already given it to be understood that he would decline.'
In the ensuing volumes, we see him finding great success. But life goes horribly wrong and Mary has to step up and take the reins... I particularly liked the way that the final volume is written in part from the viewpoint of their young son, Cuffy, and how his feelings and behaviour are shaped by being moved from pillar to post and having a Papa of whom he is ashamed.
Absolutely wonderful read that deserves to be better known.
Wonderful characterization and descriptions of Australian life at this time for both the haves and have-nots. Although written in 1917, I found the style very much of the Victorian era in which the book is set. Deserves to be much more famous than it is. ( )

I read this book shortly after the birth of my second child (who turns 29 in about six weeks time). It was on the syllabus for a university course I was doing at the time. My enduring memory is sitting in bed at 2.00 am, reading while feeding the baby, with my tears falling onto his head. And then, continuing to read, well after the baby was asleep again, because I couldn't put it down. An epic book. ( )

A soul's slow, slow descent. I remember the trauma. ( )