Parodic feast

Patrick White got it wrong. European Australians have never been driven to find spiritual meaning through physical deprivation in the deserts of the interior. Their passion has been for housing and construction, matched by their devoted gourmandising. White declared that in Voss he was trying to teach a nation of timid city dwellers that there was more to life than material comfort and ‘cake and steak’. He did take himself rather seriously.

Not so David Musgrave, whose first novel, Glissando, provides the evidence for White’s mistaken interpretation of history. His narrator’s grandfather Heinrich Fliess (uncle of Wilhelm, the nasally obsessed colleague of Freud) set off from Rhine Towers in the mid nineteenth century, looking for a place to build another of his fantastic dream houses. His companions (those familiar followers Le Mesurier, Palfreyman, Robarts and Co.) caused him trouble until he was left only with Le Mesurier, the poet, and some helpful Aboriginal people. Heinrich was haunted by the pursuing spirit of his nagging wife, Muriel. As his Aboriginal friend Weeyah says, Europeans suffer from ‘House dreamin’’. It is all in the journals that the grandson, Archie, finds in the library of his eccentric house, ‘Glissando’. In the 1950s Archie lets an asthmatic writer, Patrick someone (Grey? Brown?), and his companion Maloney look at the diaries.