Down And Out With Moby Dick
Sydney Morning Herald
Saturday March 3, 2007
An attachment to Melville can't save the contrivance of this rite-of-passage novel.
The Secret of Lost ThingsBy Sheridan HayFourth Estate, 354pp, $27.99IN 1946 ORWELL wrote an essay called "Confessions of a Book Reviewer". It was a heartfelt thing he wrote in a moment of mid-morning misery - he claimed he was wearing his dressing gown - and he noted that the more deeply involved you are in the book business the more you realise how many bad books are being written.Book reviewing is the same as any reviewing: the reviewer is nothing other than the humble servant of the reader. Reviewing should come from a base of some specialist learning or education but, no matter how hard anyone tries to deny it, it is fundamentally subjective. It is also, as Orwell indicates, sensitive to the physical and psychological situation of the reviewer. Who wouldn't understand Orwell being depressed in postwar London with poor health (TB) and very little cash? In such circumstances even the most angelically tempered might feel low-spirited; not a fine place to be when making comments about other people's art.However, this humble servant can't find any particular depression or sourness in her current disposition. She isn't in her dressing gown, the bank account isn't dire and she's yet to cough up blood. And still she cannot find engagement with this coming-of-age novel.In the early 1980s an 18-year-old orphan arrives in New York from Tasmania, finds a job in a bookshop called The Arcade and becomes entangled with the odd lives of the people there. There is an added adventure with the discovery of an unknown Melville manuscript. The bookshop is, of course, labyrinthine and readers are encouraged to see the characters as Dickensian. The young woman is called Rosemary Savage and her birthday is Anzac Day. Her dead mother owned a hat shop called Remarkable Hats and in the best sense of Victorian melodrama Rosemary has never been told who her father is. Rosemary calls her mother "mother". I guess young girls did this in Tasmania in the 1980s. Mother has a female best friend (called Chaps) and it is Chaps who, on the death of Mother, sends our heroine into the Great World with nose-dripping self-denial and a mysterious parcel. (Am I really only up to page 20?)This novel has the feel of something that has been many years in the making. Perhaps this is why the narrative strands are ponderous and uncomfortably fused so the final result is like a giant, ill-fitting jigsaw. There's a lively patch of sky here, a rich patch of colour there, but it doesn't do the final smooth click-in. The central, and serious, problem with this book, though, is the uncertain tone as Hay wavers between the high Victorian and the contemporary. The result is that her 18-year-old is not only implausible, but annoying. A strong character will carry a story but Rosemary is unrelentingly soggy. Of the many peculiar characters inhabiting the bookshop, only one, an albino called Walter Geist, has any depth and the pages brighten when he appears.Many devoted readers would like to become writers and the impetus for The Secret of Lost Things is a sincere and respectful response to the books the author has read and loved. Unhappily the result is a string of awkward flourishes towards Shakespeare, Borges, Dickens, the Brontes and Melville. Particularly Melville. Perhaps this is why the author and I just don't connect. Shakespeare, Borges, the Brontes, Dickens: I'm as ardent about these as your next book reviewer. But Melville? Melville has never spoken to me. Poor Melville. He was born a century too early. I always think he would have benefited greatly from analysis.The Secret of Lost Things does not speak to me, either. If this were 1946 and if I were called Orwell, I might be tempted to call this a "bad" book. Perhaps I am too old for this sort of hammy writing? Reading Hay's 354 pages has aged me considerably.
© 2007 Sydney Morning Herald
