A Victorian Iceman

The Age

Saturday December 6, 2008

Stella Clarke

Louis Nowra insists his new novel about a 19th-century entrepreneur be read as fiction even though it is solidly based on the story of a historical character, writes Stella Clarke.

Ice

By Louis Nowra

Allen & Unwin, $32.95

ONCE upon a time, "ice" was frozen water. Most of it hung at the earth's extremities. It was difficult to see it; it may be so again, as the globe swelters. Louis Nowra's novel Ice begins with a spectacular, panoramic, 19th-century scene. An enormous, dazzling iceberg is towed into a crowded Sydney Harbour. We witness the drama of shimmering cold arriving in a blazing Australian summer, and recall the antique romance of a frozen polar wilderness. This is not, though, an epoch-marking novel tackling climate change.

Nowra zooms in on Scotsman Malcolm McEacharn, an ambitious entrepreneur. It is his iceberg, ready to be cubed, and he incites a revolution down under. Today, drinks clink deliciously, we pull cool comfort from our fridges; back then, this basic emancipation from the rigours of the climate was just beginning.

"Ice" also, now, connotes a pernicious drug, and Nowra deftly ropes this in. McEacharn's story blooms brightly, luridly, through the words of a vague 21st-century character, Rowan. Rowan's wife, Beatrice, lies in a coma, the result of an attack by an addict.

Beatrice is a passionate would-be biographer whose subject is McEacharn. Rowan tells Beatrice McEacharn's story, as he pieces it together from her documents, to keep her death at bay. The tale is framed by this extended, anguished moment, which has an up side for the author and an unexpected down side for the reader.

Nowra foregrounds the story-telling, not in an effortful, postmodern way, just by rooting it in the drama of a distraught speaker addressing a dying audience. His narrator, Scheherazade-style, must make the most of the story's bare bones.

As it turns out, those bones are real. Neither author nor publisher, advertises the fact, but much suggests the presence of a historical skeleton. There was, actually, a Malcolm McEacharn, lord mayor of Melbourne and instigator of our public transport infrastructure.

I asked Nowra about his apparent coyness. "I am not a fan of historical fiction," he responded, "because I think no writer can pretend he or she understands a historical character's actions, emotions and motivations, because, quite simply, such authors carry their own cultural, social and ideological baggage into the past - so why pretend it's true?"

First, I suspect, most novelists would not pretend their fictions were true. Further, some might think the exercise in understanding was worth it. But for Nowra, one of his book's charms is that it may be read as fiction, and then later, "in an act of serendipity or curiosity", be discovered to be based in fact.

The frame shows history becoming story, in a way that candidly exposes the teller and how the telling is coloured by circumstance. Nowra calls it "anti-historical" fiction. So he cannot be accused of illicit plunderings from history.

Indeed, readers might, unfortunately, remain none the wiser, and simply experience Ice as an entertaining performance. However, the real McEacharn's dogged, grandiose, patriarchal achievements seem staggering enough. His global shipping initiatives and modernising of Melbourne are not the least of it. His life was fascinating.

Rowan's version hurtles urgently, loosely, forward. In picaresque fashion, McEacharn encounters Australian shipwrecks and strandings. Rowan staves off that final severance from his wife by galloping through maniacal points in McEacharn's fiercely propelled life; his love-struck determination to make a steam train chug up an impossible hill, his fanatical work on a huge "compressed cold-air machine prototype", his overseeing of the slaughter of hundreds of animals for transportation. Rowan's McEacharn is, in his fixations, intriguing and appalling.

In his overwrought state, Rowan is most excited by McEacharn's dank, dark side, making him the victim of a macabre, obsessive love. Beneath Goathland, McEacharn's gothic, ostentatious and "electrified" Melbourne mansion, Rowan envisions the entombing of truly perverse and gruesome secrets.

Nowra's narrative showmanship here, staged to bump-start a comatose audience, may get you going too. There is, however, a peculiar flip-side to the framing.

Although the tale is fabulously imagined, teeming with ideas, the magic of the novel genre lies more in the telling than the told. Nowra's name is inevitably accompanied by the tag "prolific". His work is characterised by intensity, trauma and revelation. His talents cross genres, including essays and screen-writing, but he is best known as a playwright. Ice, perhaps, is a dramatist's novel. Despite the musty, rutting relationships, worked up to knicker-sniffing madness, despite the pale skin, red lips, blonde hair and apple-shaped buttocks, readers may not be hooked.

The biographical ruse short-changes the intricate webwork of novelistic artistry. Nowra sacrifices degrees of intimacy with his cast, seductive steps towards psychological exposure, and shifts in voice and perspective. Nuance, in language and perception, is abandoned. The many irresistible ways in which readers are goaded to wrap themselves in a character's experience are diminished. We remain separate, with it all spread out before us.

The thin presence of Rowan and his beloved doesn't compensate. Strangely, his dramatic monologue, though a flamboyant account of the 19th-century shipping magnate's life, risks monotony. Perhaps, if Nowra were less fastidious about historical fiction, this could have been a more compelling novel.

© 2008 The Age

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