Acclaimed SA author Peter Goldsworthy ventures into his personal labyrinth
SA writer Peter Goldsworthy’s first venture into the world of crime could well inspire a sequel — if he can find the energy for another literary marathon after his surprise cancer diagnosis.
In Detective Sergeant Rick Zadow, Peter Goldsworthy has created a character with legs, if not eyes that see. Blinded by a gunshot to the head, Rick’s career has been cut short, but he has a rich inner life, and a self-destructive streak that takes him on a perilous, and at times hilarious, journey through the pages of his creator’s first crime novel.
The book is called Minotaur for the Greek god with a man’s body and the head and tail of a bull, who lives at the centre of the Labyrinth. At various points in Goldsworthy’s labyrinthine plot, he has sown the seeds of what might become a second adventure for Rick and his actual and virtual world of absorbing sidekicks, including guide dog Scout and digital assistant Siri. Whether that will come to pass will depend very much on the fortunes of the author.
A year ago, Goldsworthy was diagnosed with myeloma, a serious cancer of the bone marrow that affects the plasma cells. The news came at the end of what he describes as an eight-year marathon writing Minotaur. He took breaks along the way to work on another couple of projects — including the libretto of the opera Ned Kelly — as well as working, as he always has, as a GP, but it was a debilitating process.
“I’m not sure I’ve got another literary marathon in me,” he says now. “They are always exhausting, and obsessive, and a weekly, sometimes daily rollercoaster of thinking you are a genius and knowing you are an idiot.”
Goldsworthy’s diagnosis came almost by accident, after he’d booked a long-delayed operation for a knee replacement. The day before his appointment with the orthopaedic surgeon, the radiologist who had taken preliminary X-rays called him in.
“He said, ‘Yeah, you need a replacement, but look at the bone marrow, not the bone, the marrow’,” he recalls. “He thought it looked pretty funny. So I went straight down to the surgery and took some blood. I didn’t really believe him. I took the blood myself and sent it off, and three days later, sure enough, he was right. It was myeloma.”
Goldsworthy has lost two friends to the disease, so even without his medical training, he knew this was a serious cancer. One of them was the actor Paul Blackwell. A couple of months before his death last February, Blackwell and his wife went to dinner at Goldsworthy’s house. “We were comparing drugs,” he says.
With the diagnosis, life was put on hold. An end-of-year trip to Sri Lanka was cancelled, as were plans to attend the premiere of Ned Kelly at Perth Festival in February. He began the process of selling his medical practice. The literary marathon that was the writing of Minotaur had, however, not yet finished. As it turned out, the final draft was completed while the author was in the cancer ward of the Royal Adelaide Hospital, undergoing the first bout of what would be three months of chemotherapy. It was so toxic that for the first 10 days he was kept under observation in hospital. “It wouldn’t be the first novel finished on chemotherapy,” he says lightly.
Goldsworthy’s buoyant mood on the day SAWeekend visits him in the inner-city terrace he shares with his wife, Lisa Temple, owes something to the fact that this is “a Dex day”. The cocktail of drugs he’s now on includes Dexamethasone, which speeds him up at the start of the week, and leaves him flat by Friday. “It’s cortisone, which I have Mondays in a big dose,” he says. “So Mondays and Tuesdays I talk too much and I don’t sleep very well … I’m a bit manic. So shut me up if I don’t shut up. But I don’t mind it because it gives me energy.”
The treatment included, after that first three months of chemo, a stem cell transplant, using his own stem cells. He launches into an animated account of the process, which he finds intriguing, not just as a medico but as a novelist, too.
“You spend a couple of days in (hospital) with your blood running through this machine that just centrifuges out the stem cells,” he says. “First of all they give you these drugs, that make the stem cells — they live in the marrow — jump out of the marrow into the blood. It’s so ingenious. Then they filter them out then they store them.”
A few weeks later, the transplant began. Around 10 days in, the expected whole-body meltdown arrived. “The shit hit the fan, which it did literally,” says Goldsworthy, chuckling at the memory. “It was the night of the Ned Kelly opening in Perth. A friend sent a little (SMS) video of the audience applauding and right at that moment I was on a barouche lying in my own shit in emergency. And I thought, ‘Oh, this is fantastic. Someone’s trying to mess with my head here’. Fifteen minutes of fame and 15 minutes of shit.”
Kept in the RAH for 10 days while he stabilised, Goldsworthy received the first edit of Minotaur from his publishers. “I got the copy edit from the editor, who is a very good chap,” he says. “Apart from doing all the normal things that editors do he’d send me notes in the margin saying, ‘I don’t think Scout’s been fed for 36 hours, Peter’. I liked that. He’s a dog lover.”
Goldsworthy spent his early life in Penola, finishing his schooling in Darwin, an experience he fictionalised in his first novel. In a lifetime of literary achievement he has written in many genres, including poetry, theatre, short stories and opera libretti, but not, until now, crime.
“I wanted to take some of the tropes of crime — I like crime books — and to do something different with them,” he says. “I wanted it to have the narrative propulsion of a crime novel or maybe a Jason Bourne movie but, of course, you can’t stop running off into comic riffs or whatever. Well, I can’t!”
There are many of those, on the page and in conversation. “I tell you, the amount of stuff that ended up on the cutting room floor,” he adds. “I was, ‘Come on, Peter, get back on track mate!’ And I suppose I wanted to find something deeper. Just play around. The great thing about writing is that, and it’s taken me a long time to realise it, that there’s a real freedom. I mean, you can never quite escape yourself … you’re not free from your own restraints, but you can bash against them. And you do have that freedom of the imagination.”
Late in his career — Goldsworthy is now 67 — he’s learned to be more patient with the process. Stalled after five years into the writing, the novel came back to life after Temple urged him to return to the first draft. “It did take me a long time to see where it was it was going, and what was happening,” he says. “I mean, I sort of knew what was going to happen in the end, which you don’t always know.”
His blind protagonist was getting around with a white stick, his guide dog, and a talking GPS device called Trekker. “But then along came Siri, so technology was evolving more quickly than my novel and in some ways that was fantastic because I suddenly saw some things that brought it back to life,” he says. “So funnily enough, Siri rescued me too. Siri showed me how to navigate my way through the labyrinth of writing the novel.”
A year on, Goldsworthy has found a new rhythm to his altered life. He’s on a mild form of chemotherapy, as well as an experimental drug which he’ll take for a year, or until the peripheral neuropathy that’s one of the side effects becomes more than he can bear. His practice sold, he has gone back to work there for 10 to 15 hours each week, restored to his cherished extended family of patients.
He’s slowly regaining the 10kg he lost, along with his hair and his entire immune system, with the stem cell transplant. Once he’s had all his “baby shots”, his patients won’t have to be quite so rigorously screened before appointments, and he’ll stop going to the cancer gym and join a regular gym. He meditates daily. There’s a heightened sense of the wonder of existence. And gratitude for a life well-lived. These reflections come not on that Dex day of our interview, when serious questions are hijacked by droll diversions, but later, via email.
“If you have to get a cancer, there are worse ones,” he says. “Besides, I trust medical science. There are immense mysteries in consciousness, and existence, but if I have anything that resembles a god I suppose it’s science. It can make mistakes but unlike the other gods, it learns from them. That’s how it continually improves.”
He admits to toying with the idea of a follow-up to Minotaur. But until the long-term outlook is clearer, he’ll focus on short stories, poems and essays. “For now, I’ve been writing a kind of journal of cancer, and of what I’ve been reading during this last year of chemo, with poems and shorter things spilling out,” he says. “Cancer is a journey, hopefully a longish one. That’s possible, with improving myeloma treatments.”
There’s been a self-reckoning, too. “Cancer is a test of character,” he says. “You do start looking more closely at your character failings, the mistakes you’ve made, the people you’ve hurt. It’s never too late for some life lessons.”
Rather than railing against the disease, that, having taken two good friends, then settled in his bones, he counts his blessings. “You certainly don’t take your luck in life so much for granted,” he says. “Cancer is always unfair, but I’ve had way beyond my fair share of other things. Genetic luck, parental luck, family luck, being lucky in love. “Just the place you happen to be born in is a lottery of luck, and is massively, globally unfair. I have been so, so lucky in the people who love me, way beyond what I deserve.
“In other words, the old cliches prove to be true. But that’s what cliches are — democratically elected truth. Especially the ones about love.”
Minotaur by Peter Goldsworthy (Viking, $32.99), is out now