a novel of lurid, postcolonial truth-telling
- Written by Timothy Michael Rowse, Emeritus Professor, Western Sydney University
How can fiction contribute to the “truth” that the Uluru Statement asks us to tell? Allen and Unwin’s answer to that question is, in part, one of paratext. By composing a book’s paratext, a publisher addresses the reader about how to experience the book. The paratext of Paul Daley’s Jesustown includes 12 signed commendations on the first four pages and a four-page “Author Note” at the end of the story.
Review: Jesustown - Paul Daley (Allen & Unwin)
Four of the commendations beckon readers towards redemption. Novelist Chris Hammer discovered “the possibility of redemption” in Jesustown and journalist Tony Wright sees “tough redemption” in it. For academic John Carty, the novel eschews “neat redemption”. In author Nigel Featherstone’s view, Jesustown is “part of the movement that will set things right”.
The publisher is thus offering Jesustown to a public that acknowledges the necessity and possibility of its own redemption.
The book’s pervasive mood is remorse. Three male characters – an anguished patriline – are central to Jesustown, and in the partatext we are urged, as a nation reading, to share in their shame. Each of these three men has done things that he broods upon, and two of them narrate these deeds in the first person.
Self-loathing
The predominant narrator is an Australian historian, Patrick Renmark, appointed to a British university. His marriage has just collapsed because his wife Cate will not forgive his affair with Merridy, an archivist. Patrick’s attempt to sever himself from Merridy has contributed to the death of Cate and Patrick’s son, Bee.
Just how this catastrophe has come about is revealed gradually to the reader by Patrick’s self-loathing story, starting with the book’s opening sentence:
How does it feel to lose the three people you love the most?
One of the novel’s narrative drivers is the reader’s desire to know just how a seduction in the stacks of a military history archive could end in Bee’s funeral, the book’s opening scene.
An image from December 6, 2021, of final preparations being made for the first reburial ceremony of Kaurna Aboriginal remains, previously held by the South Australian Museum, at the Kaurna Wangayarta Memorial Park at Smithfield in Adelaide’s north.
South Australian Museum
Read more:
Friday essay: Indigenous afterlives in Britain
Insistent framing
Commendations of Jesustown included by Allen and Unwin accordingly inflect the novel as an indictment of the nation. Carty praises Daley for making “this barbarous truth of Australian history […] painfully personal”.
The historian Mark McKenna finds it “unflinching in its gaze” and to author Jock Serong, the novel offers “unflinching examination of the truths white Australia refuses to acknowledge”. Tony Wright applauds its “desperate secrets and hard truths”. The ABC’s Michael Brissenden sees the book as dissecting “the arrogance of white history and generations of moral failure”.
The task of the paratext of Jesustown is thus to reconcile its fictionality with truth.
A less lurid historical novel would not require such insistent framing. Daley is not Kate Grenville. He writes fluently, and he skilfully paces his revelations, but his moral imagination is too passionate to risk complicating either the critical narrative of Australia’s colonial history or the feminist psychology of manhood.
You will get pleasure from Jesustown if your expectation of truth-telling includes being predisposed to demonise anthropologists, missionaries and philandering men and to cherish women and First Nations people as humanity’s best hope.
Jesustown is a reminder that to the extent that post-colonial truth-telling proliferates, it will be blessed with moments of kitsch.
Authors: Timothy Michael Rowse, Emeritus Professor, Western Sydney UniversityRead more https://theconversation.com/paul-daleys-jesustown-a-novel-of-lurid-postcolonial-truth-telling-185498
