Fiona Capp

While I was reading this compelling but occasionally problematic novel, I started thinking about Oscar Wilde. Pretentious? Moi? The thing is, when I’m torn between opposing views of the same thing, I tend to think of Wilde’s The Ballad of Reading Gaol … ‘two men looked out from prison bars, one saw mud, the other stars’. So I found myself in two minds about this book, mainly because, two thirds of the way through, I began to lose sympathy for the main character, Esther Chatwin, wife of a contemporary Australian prime minister (no one we know), a woman none too keen on her role.

Late in My Blood’s Country, Fiona Capp describes a dream that Meredith McKinney had after the death of her mother, Judith Wright, poet, activist, and the subject of Capp’s book. In the dream, McKinney is at Calanthe, the Queensland home where she lived with her mother and father, philosopher Jack McKinney. A literary festival is under way. In the front room of the house, the study where Wright wrote her poems, scholars are giving papers about her work. McKinney, aware that her reactions are being scrutinised, is careful to react generously. The group moves from room to room, into the more private spaces of the home, Meredith feeling compelled all the while to be gracious in the face of this invasion. An exhibition in her parents’ bedroom centres on a life-size wax dummy of Wright, said to be wearing her clothes, though actually wearing something McKinney recognises as part of an old curtain. As she notices more mistakes in the display, one of the dummy’s arms falls off, and it is suddenly clear that the dummy is in fact her mother’s corpse.

Pitched awkwardly between mass-market romance and a literary novel, Musk and Byrne is a curious creation. Spending excessive verbal effort on a familiar and rather vacuous plot, the book never finds a satisfactory shape, and finally lacks a true purpose. Never intellectually thorough enough to offer an exploration of artistic identity, and not trashy enough to deliver tawdry thrills, it is both too well written and not very original.

For the eighteen months or so that I taught novel writing a few years back, I was haunted by a remark of Somerset Maugham’s: ‘There are three rules for writing a novel, unfortunately nobody knows what they are.’ In his teasing way, Maugham is suggesting that while the novel has a recognisable form, it cannot – for a multitude of reasons – be reduced to a formula. What escapes definition is what makes the journey into the unknown worth the effort for both the writer and the reader. The danger is, of course, that such a remark can be used to mystify the whole process and imply that creative writing can’t be taught. You either have what it takes or you don’t.