No sooner had novelist Rodney Hall arrived in Chicago from his native Australia than he asked an urgent favor of his hostess: Could she possibly get him a ticket to the Chicago Symphony? Sorry, Hall was told, but the symphony is out of the country, touring Australia.
”I was furious,” Hall said, but with a smile that indicated he still could appreciate the irony. ”I`d stopped over in New York, where a friend had suggested that we go to a concert. No way, I said, I`m saving the music for Chicago. The Chicago Symphony is the best orchestra in this country.”
So far this had been the only discordant note on Hall`s five-month sabbatical, a week of which was spent in Chicago and other Illinois cities as part of an exchange program arranged by the Illinois secretary of state for Australia`s bicentennial. Otherwise, his visit couldn`t have been more profitably timed, because it coincides with a newly awakened American interest in his country`s popular culture., especially its films and books. With his latest novel, ”Captivity Captive” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $15.95) having just appeared in American bookstores, Hall couldn`t help but benefit.
Though his novel scarcely could be more dark and funereal, Hall is a cheerful soul who was more amused than annoyed to find that Australia`s image in this country has been reduced to such commercial and aboriginal stereotypes as Crocodile Dundee, the Qantas koala bear and Foster`s Lager. ”Actually, Crocodile Dundee is not so far removed from ordinary Australians,” he said.
”I could introduce you to a dozen men like that in Bermagui, the fishing village near my house in New South Wales. Dundee is romanticized and made shallow, but like any caricature, he`s based on reality, even though the men I know don`t carry long knives.”
Hall did caution that it might be unwise to ”ignore the fact that Australia is a complex place and that we have highly sophisticated scientists, universities and a truly great writer in Patrick White, who is a challenge and an inspiration to us all.” Nor is it a country made up exclusively of beer drinkers, as TV commercials seem to suggest. ”We have an enormous number of wonderful wines,” Hall said, ”and we drink a lot of them.”
Lean and leathery, with a graying beard, Hall, 52, looks more like a backwoodsman than a writer of cultivated, recondite fiction and poetry, whose 1982 novel, ”Just Relations,” brought him the country`s most distinguished literary prize. In fact, Hall says he does live in the bush, in a house on the southern coast, 250 miles below Sydney, that`s equipped with neither heat nor electricity. ”We have a wood stove,” he said, ”but the climate is mild, and we`ve never had a frost. This new book has been doing so well, though, that I think it`ll buy me solar lighting.”
Based on what may be Australia`s most infamous unsolved crime,
”Captivity Captive” would seem to have a potentially huge mass appeal. In that 1898 case, three grown siblings in a large farming family-a brother and two sisters-were bludgeoned to death, the women sexually violated. But even though Hall proposes an ingenious and diabolical solution to the triple murder, the book is not likely to satisfy aficionados of standard whodunits, who expect the author to deliver a conventional story of crime, detection and punishment, with a mechanical and orderly denouement.
Instead, ”Captivity Captive” is a poetic improvisation on the murders, a circuitous, 200-page ”confession” that is told by a surviving brother a half-century later, in a voice that`s filled with a mystical, primitive imagery.
Hall was a musician before he became a writer, which helps explain both his acute disappointment in missing the Chicago Symphony and the ”rondo”
structure of the novel, with the narrator repeatedly returning to the scene of the crime. Hall also granted that the book, particularly its conclusion, is operatic. ”Yes,” he said, ”I like the word, operatic, because it gives a feel for the texture of the book. An opera is a drama of passions, not a drama of action.”
The most violent of these passions are aroused by the tyrannical father, Daniel Murphy, a physical giant who is tormented by visions of eternal hellfire, who treats his children as indentured servants. In this unholy
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”Paradise,” as the farm is called, the father and other members of the Murphy family also are meant to represent the most incestuous and barbaric aspects of colonialism.
Hall said he conceived the book one day while walking his dog in the bush. ”I`d had this idea to use the case some years before, but I didn`t want to spend my time writing a pastiche of 19th Century English. Then, as I was out for a walk, I thought, `Yes, but what if it`s told by one of the brothers, who`s an old man in the 1950s, and I don`t have to invent a language?`
”So I started writing in my notebook, which I always carry with me. One line led to another, and before long I had 5,000 words. I knew nothing about the murder except what I`d heard in school, which was quite wrong, as it turned out. Later I got a copy of a book about the crime, opened it to the last page and found out it was still unsolved. That`s all I needed to know. I took the characters` real names and a description of the bodies, but everything else was invented. I had no plan for the novel, and it wasn`t until I got to the very end that I discovered who`d done it.”
Because of his anticolonialism, Hall said his books have not won him a lot of favor in England, where critics are ”not inclined to like us colonials breaking loose. They want their books more restrained. I`m a bit maximalist for their taste.” But ”Captivity Captive” has impressed American reviewers, one of whom detected echoes of Sophocles and Shakespeare in the narrator`s powerful voice.
Hall wasn`t displeased by either of these comparisons, but he was surprised when a resident critic for the country`s newspaper of record drew extensive parallels between his novel and ”The Sound and the Fury,”
attempting to show that the Murphys were literary offspring of Faulkner`s Compson family.
”Because I`ve had such an erratic self-education,” Hall explained,
”there are many great books I haven`t read. `The Sound and the Fury` is one of them. But now I`m going to put it very high on my reading list.”