Burning issues in a quest for truth
Sydney Morning Herald
Saturday September 26, 2009
A South African-born journalist has turned successfully to crime and the Australian landscape. IN A SHORT essay in Greil Marcus and Werner Sollors's A New Literary History of America, Walter Mosley, the creator of Ezy Rawlins, muses on the hardboiled: "In the pages of any hardboiled book worth its ink is the question €“ Can I do right in a world gone wrong? There is no one answer to this question. People in a hardboiled world have had to improvise from the moment they were born. The writer may have a notion of what is right and make a world where the ending, if not exactly happy, is at least satisfying."It's not clear if Peter Temple is as hardboiled a writer as some of the examples Mosley has in mind, but certainly his main characters are trying in their own shambolic way to get things right. Usually after they've previously got them spectacularly wrong in an unco-operative world. Think Jack Irish, his Fitzroy solicitor-cum-fixer; think Joe Cashin in The Broken Shore; and now think Stephen Villani.His new hero €“ if that's the right word for this flawed character €“ appeared in The Broken Shore, which won the major award from the British Crime Writers Association and added yet another Ned Kelly to Temple's large collection of Australian Crime Writers Association gongs.Temple is a world away from those American mean streets and a decent train ride from the ones in Melbourne where the new novel is set. He is near his Ballarat home in a cafe where he is a regular fixture, known by many and appearing to know everyone else. The staff are taking advance orders for Truth.Truth is not a sequel to The Broken Shore €“ more a companion piece. Temple was worried that readers might get the impression that it heralded another series. (Not that he's done with either Cashin or Irish. Both pop up in Truth. And there will be more Irish down the track.)Villani, the head of homicide, is dealing with a couple of ghastly murders and endeavouring to deal with the dismal state of his marriage, his on-off affair with a television journalist and his role as a father, a brother and, significantly, a son. All this in a Melbourne enveloped in the stink of political and corporate corruption and bushland that is about to burst into flames.The British crime writer John Harvey reckons Truth is a pretty apt title for one of Peter's books. "In common with many of the best crime writers, he often uses the mechanics of the crime novel to strip away layers of hypocrisy. He has a knack of pinning down the day-to-day nature of people's lives and laying bare their weaknesses and obsessions."Temple has always been interested in power and its exercise €“ "what I see as the disintegration of things, the way every step forward carries with it its own slide backwards, that all the things we try to do even with the best of intentions are doomed". He doesn't like to make things easy for the reader. That's largely for his own benefit €“ when he reads other writers of crime, he finds them never as complicated as they should be. "I hate having things spelled out to me."So he tries to be as elliptical as possible and his publisher, Michael Heyward, at Text, can get a bit exasperated. "He says, 'I think you've compressed this to the point of incomprehension,' and I say, 'That is exactly what I was trying to do.' "He had wanted to write a book set in summer €“ "I tend to write books set in the winter" €“ and wanted to locate it at a time when the whole state of Victoria was burning. "I like the image of the heat and the fires and then all that personal stuff coming in, tangled and retangled, and old crimes coming to the surface and family disintegration."And by the time of Black Saturday in February he was about three-quarters of the way through. "And after that I stopped and ground to a halt. I didn't know what to do. I thought this is so awful. I was very taken aback when it happened. I thought somehow I've brought this about in that strange way for a split second."He wrote other things for a while but returned to the book. The fires play a significant role, particularly at the end, a part he had already written. "In the end I thought, 'Go for your life.' It's not in any way disrespectful."When he talks about his writing, Temple seems disarmingly blas. The reason he has been doing "this sort of thing", crime, is to have something to compel stories forward. He needs an inner momentum and it is only then that "the people can interact and talk, which I like".He tends to start a book several times, trying to find something that has a future. "I started this one with the characters €“ this is one of the few that ends up with the original beginning, though it was scrapped several times on the way. Two blokes driving across the West Gate Bridge on their way from something ghastly on their way to something else ghastly."Villani and his colleague, Birkerts, are talking about the past, "bringing the two books into some kind of alignment without telling the reader. I'm not interested in recapitulating the plot of The Broken Shore €“ you can read it if you want to see what happens €“ but there are lots of clues and they talk about things."At the heart of the book €“ at the heart of most of his books, it's fair to say €“ is an interest in the dynamics of male friendship and the relationship between men in families €“ "competitive and often painful". Villani has two brothers and a father and the burning state provides an opportunity in Truth for things in their family to come to a head."In a way, relationships with women always follow the pattern of your relationship with your mother, which, by and large, for most people is a good and comforting one," Temple says. "By and large most relationships with fathers may be good but seldom comforting. I'm drawn to it because once you've put the characters together, if there is no conflict there is nothing."You wouldn't know from his books that Temple grew up in South Africa, leaving in 1977 when he was 32. He grew up in a small town near the Botswana border where the English-speaking whites copped a lot from the Afrikaners and there wasn't much to do."It's hard to ever think that you experienced boredom in your childhood but I think I must have. Certainly my family were all readers. My mother always had the boast that we all read A Short History of England before we were 12. What does that tell you about a colonial past? What does it say about the dominance of empire?"He reached Australia after a couple of years in Germany, joining The Sydney Morning Herald as education editor, teaching at what is now Charles Sturt University and moving to Melbourne in 1982 to edit Australian Society and then establishing the editing and publishing course at RMIT.He has been back to South Africa only twice in more than 30 years €“ for just 12 days in all. "I disliked the place intensely. I had huge hopes for the post-apartheid society and didn't want to go back and be disappointed. And I have and I was."He says all he wanted after apartheid was revenge. He wanted "all the key Boers responsible for all the crimes" to be put on trial. But the prevailing mood was for forgiveness and reconciliation and Temple had big disagreements with his family."I think now that they had no choice. I don't see that you could have done it any other way. I think the outcome has been sad. Sad not because of that €“ one would have liked to see the just deserts €“ but the way it's evolved. It's turned itself into a Third World country."As a journalist on the Cape Argus he was asked in 1974 by the paper's literary editor to review Dusklands, two novellas by a South African academic newly returned from the US. Temple gave J.M. Coetzee his first review: "The author is a lecturer in English at the University of Cape Town and, by any standards, a major talent," he wrote. "Indeed, it is hard to believe that this elegant, precise and shocking work is his first published fiction. Dusklands is deserving of a fate few novels merit; it should be read twice."So what is it about truth? It's what a writer does, Temple says: create the illusion of truth. "If you're looking for truth, then it's going to be truth of another kind. If there's going to be truth in it, it's about the emotional response, it's not about the accuracy of the detail. It's about the fact that it spoke to you."Truth is published next week by Text Publishing, $32.95.
© 2009 Sydney Morning Herald
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