Historical Fiction

There are a number of strands at play in this curiously titled novel set in postwar London in the Coronation year, 1953. The well-to-do Mrs Harriet Wallis, convicted of the murder of her husband, Cecil, becomes the second-last woman in England to be hanged. The last woman to be executed for murder in England was Ruth Ellis, about whom Mike Newell made the film Dance with a Stranger (1985), with Miranda Richardson as Ellis.

Soon after the end of World War II, Robert Booker, husband of Catherine, returns from service in New Guinea to their home in Sydney. It is immediately apparent that their relationship has deteriorated. With Catherine’s hasty disposal of a telegram from an American soldier named Lewis, we learn that she has had an affair, and also a child, in Robert’s absence. The story then moves back to 1944, when the liaison began. Eventually it returns to the present, and Catherine has a hard time concealing her affair and child from her husband.

Shira Nayman’s first novel is full of echoes and resonances. There may even be an echo of Bernhard Schlink’s The Reader. Set at more or less the same time, The Listener has the same immediate backdrop: World War II, its atrocities and aftermath.

Two years after the end of the war, Dr Henry Harrison – the narrator and listener of the piece – encounters a man who will become his most memorable case. Dr Harrison is the director and chief psychiatrist of Shadowlands, a private mental hospital located at White Plains, not far from New York. The exclusive institution is grand, more of a country club than an asylum, with beautiful buildings, extensive woods and formal gardens. Inmates, though voluntarily committed, are known as ‘patients’, not the more egalitarian ‘clients’ or euphemistic ‘guests’ of the present day. Many of them are suffering from war neurosis, a condition that Dr Harrison has been treating for many years. During the war he was required to treat mentally disturbed or shell-shocked officers and to send them back, supposedly cured, to the front. This was to ‘staunch the wastage’, according to the army. Over time he has come to doubt the efficacy of this treatment. By researching complex cases such as that of Bertram Reiner, he seeks to refine his methods.

On the inside of the title page, we learn that this is a work of fiction to be shelved alongside other books about horse whisperers. Together with the schmaltzy subtitle, this is a less than promising start. Not that I am fundamentally opposed to animal stories. But horses? I distrust whatever parades as noble, whether beast or human. Horses are for viewing from a distance.

In this novel, young Tag Wardell becomes renowned for his marvellous way with horses, both in his native Gippsland and later in the army. I am none the wiser about what exactly he does, or why he is so exceptional. He treats animals decently, talks to them and doles out oats from his pocket. Give him the chance, and he’ll brush them down. Once he even gives a nurse the same treatment. There is no magic in this. What it translates to is that everything and everyone has their price.

There is something of the Famous Five about this book, largely due to the central character. It is the 1870s and botanist Ingrid – ‘a woman in trousers’ – is on her horse, Thistle, collecting specimens in Western Australia. She and her father, who dearly misses her back in Adelaide, are writing and illustrating a book on wildflowers. Ingrid is practical and can fix a broken water pump; even though she is considered eccentric, people seek her advice.

It is surely impossible to read a new work of Australian historical fiction without doing so through the lens of Inga Clendinnen’s much-discussed essay The History Question (2006). One of Clendinnen’s arguments is against claims for the superiority of fiction over history because the former brings the past to life through imaginative empathy, allowing readers to ‘get inside the experience’, while history is merely a desiccated ‘world of facts’. Clendinnen also sets out the differences she sees between fiction and history, which are standing on either side of a ‘ravine’. In her response to correspondence in the following Quarterly Essay, she expressed her position concisely: ‘Fiction carries us deeply, effortlessly into imagined individual subjectivities. History is the sustained attempt to penetrate the minds and experiences of actual others.’

A conversation about an anachronism led Rodney Hall to this new novel, Love without Hope. He acknowledges his wife as the person who informed him that until the 1980s there was a Department of Lunacy in New South Wales, with an asylum superintendent titled the Master of Lunacy.

At once extravagant and tightly wrapped, this novel reinforces the view that historical fiction says as much about the present and the future as it does about the past. At the level of history proper, Anouar Benmalek’s vision unites three continents that, in the second half of the nineteenth century, are subject to the depredations of European colonialism and domestic tyranny. At the human level, his fiction is preoccupied with the bodily functions and basic needs of survival: things that never change. The broad, impersonal sweep of world history is made up of the infinitesimally small transactions of the primal scene: copulating, defecating, vomiting, bleeding, all driven by the elemental forces of fear and desire, violence and conscience.