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Lost in the Bush
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10397 |
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BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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2 / 1993 |
2,478 Words |
| Author
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Robert Ross
Robert Ross is a freelance writer and critic who has
published widely on postcolonial literature. |
VANISHING POINTS
Thea Astley
New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1992
234 pp., $21.95
In a twist of language typical of her stylistic oddities, Thea Astely calls one of the Oceanside resorts she condemns in Vanishing Points a "joy stalag." Yet the major characters in the book's two linked novellas find little joy in the "over priced ecstasy" of the hotels that clutter the once pristine northeastern coasts of Australia. Instead, they see themselves as cast out, then imprisoned in emotional stalags of their own invention. The tourists who stay at these "tenement" hotels Astely dubs "joyfesters." But for the central character in the first novella, "The Genteel Poverty Bus Company," it is an overwhelming resentment against the invasion that festers, not joy. The first-person female narrator of the other extended story, "Inventing the Weather," shares the thinking of this self-styled hermit, even though they never meet.
"The Genteel Poverty Bus Company" takes its title from the name of Macintosh Hope's failed alternative tourist venture, which offered "smell-of-an-oil-rag bus tours" of northern Queens land's deserted reaches far from the fashionable resorts along the coast. Weary of the "quick-kicks" discordance that pervades public places, Mac fills the rickety bus with his favorite classical music, not caring whether the clients favor it or not.
The mishaps of the Genteel Poverty Bus Company, however, are past and are revealed in intervening chapters. What takes place in the present concerns Mac's trial by ordeal as he seeks solitude from a society he does not particularly like--and that from all accounts does not like him. He leases an island, only to watch one of the hated resorts spring up on a neighboring island and open its doors to "joyfesters." Before long, Mac's solitary evenings are "shredded into vile ragged lengths" by the "raucous screech of the newly opened disco." In retaliation, Mac wages war with gigantic speakers blaring classical music all night long, an idea he picked up from the Americans' attempt to flush out General Noriega with hard rock. Hidden in a maze he has created amid the jungle foliage, the speakers assume mythical proportions: "The Minotaur was two dangling sound pods on a gangling creeper." After a while the assaults waged with weapons like Wagnerian operas fail, and Mac leaves "His Eden!" where "the serpent arrived amplified."
Inventing a 'hot-smelling sprawl'
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