Roddy Parr by Peter Rose.
Roddy Parr is the creation of Peter Rose, and uses many of the same characters from his first novel, A Case of Knives. Rose wrote the intimate family memoir, Rose Boys.
Rose is also editor of The Australian Book Review so is writing about what he knows well: the literary world, reviewers, authors and agents. As a biographer, he is using this novel as an opportunity to raise ethical issues around life story writing: how enmeshed should you be with the subject? What is the trade-off between intimacy and objectivity? How much do you give in to the popular demand for the sensational?
Rose takes some risks with this novel, referencing Henry James, William Faulkner and Patrick White; and dropping in quotes and allusions. The danger is that the reader is drawn to make comparisons. While reading the novel I was worried that it might become too smug and pretentious, but eventually the book captured me, the plot if not the characters, and its ending justifies the journey.
It is ostensibly a love story. Rodney Parr has just been awarded his doctorate for a study of the great Australian (fictional) author David Anthem. He gets the opportunity to work closely with his literary hero, compiling a collection of Anthem's letters (reminiscent of David Marr working with Patrick White).
Then Rodney falls in love with Anthem's daughter Cilla, improbably pert and bouncy. At the same time he is hoping to be the one honoured by David Anthem by being asked to write his authorised biography.
This book is as much about the messiness of family and relationships as it is about the grander themes of story-telling, creativity and ethics.
There are some cautions: everyone seems to have multiple partners of either gender - this may or may not be de rigueur in the heady world of the literary elite, I wouldn't know. Also, there is a curious lack of any spiritual elements, although Rose hints that this is a deliberate choice for authors in terms of vocational motivation, through the voice of Anthem:
Why not a pursuit as antithetical to Mosman and civic-mindedness and mystic Anglicanism as modernist literature?
Ironically, Rodney is portrayed as a Christlike figure, entrusted with the responsibility of writing "the gospel" of his mentor's life story, and even described in one scene as a "Man of Sorrows: stripped, bound, outcast, beaten, defiled."
In this way, the folly of Rodney's idolatry should have been revealed. No man is worthy of worship, only the one true God. Even for non-Christians, idolatry eventually dehumanises and distracts. And no sacrifice is sufficient to deal with the mess of our sin and failed relationships, except the dying and rising Christ. Rodney is caught up by a past, present and future he is powerless to influence.
I was left with a sense of how bleak and tasteless life without God is, and how desperate we can be to build and defend our pathetic little kingdoms.
