Kindle. The first of Koch's Miles Franklin winners and the second for me to read. The followup to his breakthrough The Year of Living Dangerously (1978).
A fair bit of this is autofiction, going by his Wikipedia bio, and perhaps a (further) revision of his debut The Boys in the Island (1958, revised in 1974). We start in 1940s schoolboy Tasmania with narrator, polio-affected Richard Miller, slogging it up the hill to the Catholic school in Hobart run by the (brutal) Christian Brothers. Soon enough he encounters a lusty married woman from Sydney, and then a pair of local musos and their mysterious teacher Clive Broderick. All proceed to the mainland in pursuit of predestined destinies. Melbourne is a barely-there way station. Sydney amounts to no more than its cliches; Kings Cross an eternal seedy Bohemia sliding into the abyss, though the affordable rents in subdivided Elizabeth Bay mansions caught my attention. The CBD itself went unnoticed as the skyscrapers closed in.
Miller's role is to get the band coverage on the ABS, where he has smoothly risen to his station in life. (I take that to mean the Australian Broadcasting Service; it's unclear why Koch doesn't just call it the ABC.) The girl next door turns out to be an Estonian beauty who happens to sing and is in desperate need of a husband. What do you know, the band badly needs a female vocalist. Similarly Mrs Lusty has a step-son who handily slots in as the drummer. There's a sense that TV is rapidly eclipsing radio plays for prestige and status. Alongside excess foreshadowing, shallow characterisations that fall away (Ms Estonia, Miller's mother) and some very convenient disappearances, this is to say that the plot mostly just moves the pieces into place.
The music these guys play is folk, as a deviation from the dominant rock music of the day. They're not allergic to electric instruments and they bring the folkies with them, unlike Bob Dylan. Pentangle is a named source but not Roy Harper. (The mandatory Have a Cigar scene occurs in North Sydney.) Much is made of their virtuosity. There's a certain wry nostalgia about the gigs but I'm not sure it is intended as a requiem for the Sydney music scene. The locale and mourning of the state of art and humanity reminded me a little of Patrick White's The Vivisector.
Despite the words spilt on all these other things, the main concern of the novel is occult Faery lore, which struck me as weird beyond all imagining. The years go by in sevens. The women are witchy and idealised. Nobody ever really grows up. There is some blurring of dreams with reality but it feels forced; Koch should probably have adopted magic realism wholesale. Also this mythology is old-world Celtic; what's it doing in Tasmania? And Christianity comes in for a flogging.
I did not understand the "doubled" concept; I think he really meant something more like duality or symmetry or mirrored or dialectics or parallels or something. An example of Koch's underbaking is his twee observation that "opposites did attract, but only when commonality was hidden underneath" — can two things be genuine opposites if they share much salient commonality? At other times he seems to be grasping for some kind of essentialism: stifled, frustrated Mrs Lusty as she is against the essence of (fertile) Irish woman, the prototype/stereotype versus the actual. Whatever it was, Koch lent into it heavily. My obtusity sucked all meaning from the ending.
Tasmania might yet host the last sighting of a literary male. Some themes overlap Dennis Glover's flight of fancy (those glorious 1940s). Richard Flanagan had a lot more to say about Tasmanian Aborigines and exotic Europeans (Slovenians). And of course Robbie Arnott is all-in on the magic.
I wonder if anyone reads Koch any more.
Goodreads. Veronica Sen at the time for The Canberra Times: Koch's characters are always searching for otherness. Perhaps "divided souls" are doubled. Is Koch's text itself a cut-price revelation? Perhaps I did not recognise the stakes.
