FICTION: The Vintage and the GleaningBy Jeremy Chambers MacLehose Press, 249pp. £10.99
DOUBT AND REGRET sustain this extraordinary debut novel from Australia by an author not only in possession of an authentic feel for the ordinary but also blessed with a well-developed understanding of personal turmoil. Daily happenings and chance exchanges prove vital to a dramatic novel that could easily have become stifled by long passages of introspective monologue – and at one point almost does. This most significant risk to the narrative is a lengthy, quasiconfessional sequence spanning 47 pages, spoken not by the narrator but by a secondary character who, though convincing, never engages to the extent that Smithy, the narrator, does. He is a former sheep-shearer who has lived, and drunk, very hard.
All that liquor has landed him more or less where he is, in a sorry aftermath to his life. A wreck of a man, barely able to eat and dependent on medication, he surveys his body as if it were a ruined building. But he never lost his belief in tough work and is now a labourer in a vineyard. His wife is dead, and his grown son, Spit, appears well on the way to being a poor husband and an even poorer father.
The facts are all there, but Chambers is already so accomplished a storyteller, and so confident a writer, that the bits and pieces of information are filtered effortlessly into the story, which begins with the kind of opening scene of which film-makers dream. It is a small town, dusty in the morning sun, and Smithy, the narrator, is in the company of his fellow vineyard workers Roy and Wallace, two brilliantly drawn minor characters who may add little to the action but contribute magnificently to the atmosphere of a town with nothing to do except get drunk and talk and speculate about the next drunken brawl
Wallace, huge, mis-shapen and rarely silent, is a wonderful example of a character who simply speaks as if on autopilot: “‘Win anything on the races?’ Wallace asks me, Nope, I say . . . ‘Win anything on the lottery?’ Wallace asks, Nope, I say . . . ‘You win anything?’ I ask, ‘Me?’ says Wallace, ‘Nah.’ ” But then Wallace, as if struck by lightening, suddenly realises he has a nugget of news to relate. A local man has died: “Dropped dead. Middle of Main Street. Heart Attack.” When the narrator expresses his shock, Wallace, aware that he has an audience, proceeds: “Yep. Right in the middle of Main Street. Dead before he hit the ground, they reckon.” Wallace mulls over the story and decides to make full use of all the details. He describes how the deceased had just bought ice cream. “Eating an ice-cream . . . George Alister. Was eating an ice-cream when he carked it. Just come out of the milk bar, taken the wrapper off and that’s it.”
The scene appears complete, but the dialogue and old Wallace are not finished yet. “And you know George Alister’s dog . . . What it did do when George Alister has his heart attack? Has his heart attack and hits the ground?” The narrator continues to be held by Wallace’s spinning out of a simple fact about a man’s death. “Nicked the bloody ice-cream . . .”
Within a couple of pages the small-town world of boredom and gossip is established, and, in the midst of the predictable, Smithy, who now only has work as he no longer drinks, has begun to look at all the things he missed during the long years he spent drunk: “I look up at the sky. I look at the sun coming over the hill, squinting . . . The old ghost gum in the next paddock catches the light and it catches it high up . . .”
But Smithy does not emerge as a lost poet. Again, Chambers is too astute to do that. Instead he looks and listens and also engages with those around him. He is not a native; he has moved south and has a history that is not only unknown to the others but has become alien to him. Smithy is approaching the end of his life, his strength has deserted him and now all he has are his memories. Yet his reflexes remain, as when he seizes a rabbit children are playing with: he kills it and hands the skinned body over to a boy who is so shocked he apparently drops it, as Smithy later finds it and buries it.
He finds himself telling the young fellas beginning their drinking lives in the local bar how bad it is for them. All the while, the novel, although told mostly by Smithy, has an impressive immediacy; the town where life is lived for the boozy weekend that begins on Thursday, the locals, the dust, the heat, the smells and, most of all the bickering, live off the page. All of this balances Smithy’s reflections about a life wasted. Along with the solid base the minor characters provide is the insight into the faded vineyard itself and the way of life it once supported. Chambers introduces an unexpected complication into Smithy’s life when the old man becomes the unlikely protector of a young woman whose criminal husband is about to get free from jail.
It is at this point that the novel, deservedly included earlier this week on the 2012 International Impac Dublin Literary Award longlist, gains additional momentum while also running the risk of losing everything that Chambers has so subtly evoked. Charlotte, for a reason Chambers waits before explaining, considers Smithy her champion. She moves into the home he once shared with his now dead wife. The exchanges between Smithy and Charlotte, a local, who enjoyed – and abused – the bogus privilege provided by her father, are uneasy, if convincing. Equally, her self-absorbed, soul-searching monologue, though well executed by Chambers, is long enough to have one anxious for the return of Smithy’s rueful perception of the world. The young woman, in common with Smithy, finds it difficult to reconcile her past with the present. An element of siege enters the narrative. But this is a fine novel; it thrives not only in its powerful sense of place but also through a narrator whose final comfort is drawn from his memories of having been told as a boy that he sang like an angel.
Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of
The Irish Times
