20
The Fictional Quester

When I was a short-sighted child, reading was my whole life. I read in the bath, I read on the toilet, I read under the desk at school, I read up in my treehouse, feeling the branches of the jacaranda swell and subside under me.

One of the unforeseen griefs of becoming a writer was that I could no longer lose myself in a book the way I had as a child. I still read, of course, but now part of me was always watching how the writer had done it. There was always something to learn, something I could try in my own writing. It was a rare and compelling book that made me forget that it had been made.

One morning in October 2001 I lay on the couch in my workroom, delaying the journey to the desk, where I was starting to hate my latest assembly draft. I promised myself I could read for half an hour. It was warmer under the rug on the couch, too. In spite of a new gas heater, my workroom was draughty and a cold spring wind was pouring in around the window frame.

Anil’s Ghost, by Michael Ondaatje, is a very good book, but that wasn’t why I stayed there reading it for the rest of the morning. I was wolfing it down because Michael Ondaatje was telling me what to do.

Anil’s Ghost is a novel. Its main character is invented. But it is based on historical events, and some of the characters are apparently versions of real people. Ondaatje’s main character is on a quest to uncover a hidden episode of history.

I was thinking that Ondaatje was showing me a way out of my deadlock. The ‘I’ character in The Wiseman Book, the ‘quester’, was myself—but it didn’t have to be. I could try the sleight of hand that Ondaatje had pulled off: to fictionalise the quester, but not the quest. I could step out of the limelight, leaving the search for Wiseman and his dealings with Aboriginal people centre stage.

Sitting at the desk with the rug now wrapped around my legs against the fierce draught under the door, I thought about my fictional quester. He or she would be around my own age. He or she might have had a country childhood—even better, have grown up on the Hawkesbury. He or she would come across some evidence of a massacre—half-burned bones, something like that. He or she would start to think about those bones and what they meant. He or she would go off on a quest to find out the story behind them. And so on.

Thank you, Michael Ondaatje.

I glanced through the folder called ‘London—Wiseman’s Places’ and saw a note I’d made watching the tide turn on the Thames. No more lists, no more ‘Preliminary Outlines’. Back to what I knew: free association. Not a novel, exactly, but using some of the novel’s techniques. And, for me, the relief of being back on familiar territory.

Across the surface of the river—pocked, pitted, rough— ran another kind of roughness, a buckle across the river from one side to the other, a ridge of water, and behind it, water of a different personality: barred, furrowed, a water more like the sea. Change of tide. The line moved imperceptibly upstream, making its way against the hidden force of the current, the river current meeting the tide current, colliding, creating this impasse, this ridge along the surface. Against the face of the ridge small waves broke as if against a wall, flicking and curling all the way along its length, tongues of water trying to mount the incoming pressure of water, but pushed back, back, pushing back into their own pressure, the tide moving in its slow line up past Horselydown Old Stairs, past Suffrance Dock, up past Tower Stairs.

I stopped there. I’d run out of things to say about the change of tide on the Thames. But I skimmed another few pages in the folder and came across something Melissa Lucashenko had said in London about how illiterate people read the world in ways other than through words, and it sparked off a connected idea about Wiseman:

He’d been ashamed, in the grand church, with the columns that vanished high up into shadows, the ceiling out of sight, like God himself—been ashamed of his big fist grasping the feather, the cracked fingertips clumsy, like pieces of wood, as he scratched the nib down and then across where the curate’s white finger pointed, a blank space hemmed around with delicate spidery marks hardly the same species as his own thick lines, with a spot and a spatter where the nib had been crushed too hard against the paper. Solomon Wiseman, the curate had said, pointing. His mark. There, if you please.

He had got ink on his finger, that thick wooden finger. Later, at the Cauliflower, lifting the tankard, he’d seen it and been ashamed all over again, this mockery of an ink-stain, in the same spot on the first finger that the curate himself had had an ink-stain, as if he were pretending to be some other kind of man.

I enjoyed writing the London scenes. I felt I could go on writing them forever. I had the bed of detail from all that research, so I could see in my mind’s eye what I was writing about. It was real. I’d been there, I’d seen it. I even had objects: that bit of roof tile, now on my desk, a big map of early London on the wall. From the real, it was a leap to inventing a world and Wiseman in it, but at least I had something to trigger off those free associations.

Halfway through the second exercise book I glanced at what I’d been doing. It was all London, and I hadn’t even started to cover all that could be written about London.

I wrote a stern note to myself:

To Do:

1. Sketch the rest of the London scenes

2. Assemble London chronologically

3. MOVE ON TO AUSTRALIA!!!!

Only near the end of that second handwritten book was there anything set in Australia, a scene in which Wiseman was looking at the Hawkesbury and comparing it to London:

Looking down at the brown river, where he could see the water seething and dimpling with the flood tide, he said, think of it as the Thames before civilization, my dear. Here we are standing in Bermondsey with our feet sinking in the mire and the water pouring in—Butler’s Buildings could go right here and not feel out of place!

Jane stared out glumly. He saw her trying to force a smile, but the corners of her mouth still turned down.

It is the same width as the Thames, look pet, and brown like our own river, the tide comes in and out the same way; this is the Thames, as it was seen by our ancestors, before even the Romans.

Like me, Wiseman was putting off making the move to the southern hemisphere.

The hard part of the writing wasn’t finding the words—they seemed to come reasonably easily. If they started to come reluctantly, I stopped and began with something else. The hard part was finding the picture. Once I could see and hear the moment, I could write it. But there were long gaps between one burst of writing and another, times of frustration when I couldn’t get the picture clear, or couldn’t see anything at all. The worst times were when I tried to write the scene anyway, throwing words at something I couldn’t see or hear. The phrases would come more and more slowly, each sentence an effort. I’d read it back and groan aloud at the deadness of it. It was dead because it was phoney. I was just making it up out of words, so words were all I had: clichés, pedestrian images, abstractions. No pictures, no sounds, no smells—no life.

If I could get the picture in my mind—Wiseman looking up at the columns in Christ Church Spitalfields, the white marble steps under his feet—I could set it all in motion and see what would happen. Perhaps it’s like improvising in the theatre: you have the situation, and you make up what might happen next. Sooner or later you get to a point where it all stops, and then you have to backtrack and start again, or jump sideways until an incident begins to unfold and the writing flows.

In my struggle to see and hear what I was writing, I used whatever came to hand. I overheard Alice and her friend Ellie on the back steps after school one day having a spitting competition. I didn’t take notes or plan to use that—but the next day I found myself writing a scene in which Wiseman, as a child, had a spitting competition with his sweetheart Sophia. It made a nice warm moment between them.

I spent a couple of nights in the public ward of a hospital and made a note on a paper towel about one of the other women in the room: ‘Old Mrs Priestley—her cough the only strong thing about her.’ When I got home and found the paper towel in my handbag, I gave that cough to Wiseman’s mother. Then I realised that the cough meant she had TB, and that she’d died when Wiseman was barely more than a child.

It helped to smell as well as to see and hear. In the early documents I’d kept coming across references to something called a ‘slush lamp’. What was it made of? What did you burn in it? What sort of light did it give?

A good child of the modern age, I Googled ‘slush lamp’ and to my surprise found several sites that told me it was a small dish full of fat, with a wick that hung into the fat and over the edge.

That night I cooked lamb chops for the family dinner, catching the fat in the griller. This I poured into a little dish. Then I cast about for a wick. Cotton, not too thick. A narrow strip of rag might do. I draped this into the fat, lit a match— flint and steel would have to wait for another day—and stood back.

In the next thirty seconds I learned more about life in a bark hut on the Hawkesbury in 1817 than all the books in the world could have told me. The slush lamp produced vast amounts of dense black smoke, which smelled powerfully of burned fat.

The flame was tiny, hardly making a dent in the darkness. Watching the fat burn away I realised that those settlers had had a choice: a scrape of dripping on their dry bread, or light at night. They couldn’t afford both.

I went back to the desk and rewrote all the scenes in the hut at night.

I enjoyed making the slush lamp and I went through the draft, looking for other things I could try out. I travelled in a small boat along the Hawkesbury, made and ate ‘hominy’ and ‘pease’, had a go at making fire from two sticks (I couldn’t even get them warm) and did a thousand other small experiments.

I filled another big exercise book, and by then I’d sketched out most of the story: Wiseman grows up in London, is transported to Australia, settles on the Hawkesbury, and comes into conflict with the Aboriginal people.

For that last part, I couldn’t draw on my great-great-great grandfather, since there’d been no information about that part of his life. I adapted from other sources, giving to Wiseman the meeting between Governor Phillip and the ‘old man’ in Broken Bay, for example. I adapted loosely, but kept the basic shape of the encounter, and especially the piercing detail of the ‘three slight slaps’.

Governor Macquarie’s Proclamation, in which permission was given for settlers to shoot Aborigines, went into the writing exactly as it appeared in the Gazette.

The horrible details that I’d read about, of Aboriginal hands and ears being cut off, I gave to a character I called Smasher, whose name also came straight out of the notes I’d taken from the historians’ books. I wrote a scene in which Aboriginal people were poisoned, adapted from nineteenth-century accounts. On the basis of several descriptions in the Gazette and information about ‘penetrating injuries’ from my doctor friends, I wrote a scene in which a settler died an agonising death from a spear.

The historical account of the Waterloo Creek massacre gave me details and phrases to create an episode in which Aboriginal people are ambushed and killed. I could see the place (a particular spot on the Macdonald River) even though I found the events hard to imagine.

These scenes of violence were the most difficult I’d ever written. Even now I don’t want to look at them too closely. They had to be written because the story needed to include this aspect of the frontier, but I had to steel myself to get them done.

I didn’t want the book to end with defeat for the Aboriginal people. I had in mind a short scene at the end in which something about the land itself would demonstrate that the Aboriginal people hadn’t been destroyed:

There was a tree by the river that had grown over a rock, a big curving lip of tree-flesh, growing down and you could see the tree would eventually cover the entire rock like an octopus flowing over its prey.

But the tree, by the nature of being a thing that lived, would die, and there, underneath, would be the rock, not destroyed at all, ready to show itself to the sun for another thousand years.

It was a heavy-handed image for the idea I wanted to get across, a parallel that was much too neat. Tree equals settlers; rock equals Aboriginal people. No amount of tinkering with the words was ever going to make it work.

Never mind, fix it up later.

This first draft had a definite voice: stately, serious, even pompous. It used informal phrases now and then but it never used contractions. I hoped I could make it less precious later.

Some parts came out in the first person, sometimes it was in third person, but it was always from Wiseman’s point of view.

The first-person point of view seemed right. The book was about the choices of one individual. I didn’t want the reader to see him from the outside in an abstract way. I wanted the reader to be right there with him.

But by the time I was onto my fourth exercise book, it was clear that first person wasn’t going to work. That stately voice didn’t belong to an illiterate Thames lighterman. If the book was to be in the first person, the voice would have to become much rougher, less literary, to be convincing.

Peter Carey had published The True History of the Kelly Gang not long before. He’d brought off a virtuoso act of ventriloquism of exactly the sort I’d have to do if I wanted to write the book in Wiseman’s voice. Carey had done it so well I was sure I’d only look foolish in attempting something similar.

I was also starting to see that there were things I wanted the book to say that Wiseman couldn’t say. He didn’t understand even the small amount I did about Aboriginal culture, for one thing. I knew that the Darug would starve without the yam daisies, but Wiseman didn’t know that.

Third person it had to be, then, but ‘third person subjective’— from Wiseman’s point of view, but only partly in his voice.

I put off transcribing the contents of the exercise books into the computer, keeping that as a kind of reward. It wasn’t until about March 2002 that I gave myself that treat.

The title was already in the machine from the day I read Michael Ondaatje’s novel: The Book of the Fictional Quester. Now I started to type.

Some time later, I had a fat folder of printout and I knew for sure what I’d been suspecting for a while. There were no ‘elements of memoir’ in here at all. The fictional quester had never so much as put in an appearance. In spite of all my certainty that this book shouldn’t be a novel, I’d written just that.

I sat staring past the laptop, out the window. Someone walked by on the other side of the hedge. I couldn’t see the person through the screen of leaves, only the movement they were making. I sat very still. I liked to look out, but I hated thinking that people out there might be able to see me.

I was feeling the relief of a kid who’s been told the maths homework had been cancelled. You knew you really should come to grips with surds, but oh the joy that you didn’t have to.

But what about all those terrific reasons why this book couldn’t be a novel? I was still sure that this subject matter had to be handled in the authoritative voice of non-fiction. It felt as though I’d come a very long way around to arrive at a dead end.

I sat scrolling up and down, reading bits and pieces. I corrected a few typos. I changed the font from Times New Roman to Georgia and made it 14 point instead of 12. I made it do a first-line indent. I did a word count. I wrote it at the end of the document—58,459—and sat staring at the blinking cursor telling me I’d come to the end.

I had no idea what to do with it now. It was time to abandon ship. Leave the desk, leave the house. Leave the words behind and revisit the place behind them.