Between sanity and disarray

Sydney Bridge Upside Down By David Ballantyne Text, 278pp, $27.95

Sydney Bridge Upside Down By David Ballantyne Text, 278pp, $27.95

TO appreciate the mild surrealist fever in which this long-lost New Zealand novel unfolds, it helps to know that Sydney Bridge Upside Down is the name of an old carthorse, which is both odd and oddly right, since in the mind's eye a weary nag's prominent ribs might well recall the broad inverted curve of Sydney Harbour Bridge.

Nonetheless, like so much else in the story, this clash of images is discordant and intended to be so. Think of those creepy arpeggios moving in different directions at the same time in the score of Hitchcock's Vertigo and you'll get a sense of how the author pits differing elements against each other without letting any single one command the narrative.

In the introduction to this belated but welcome reissue, Kiwi author Kate de Goldi explains that those warring elements include "a coming-of-age story, a gothic anti-romance, a ruined pastoral thriller, a family tragedy". She also writes that the novel has been described as "proletarian fiction, young adult fiction, post-provincial fiction, [and as] the pre-eminent example" of that uniquely New Zealand genre, the slaughterhouse novel.

The great measure of the novel's success is that it can simultaneously occupy all those pigeonholes and yet belong in none of them. It is the kind of book that could only be written at the edge of the world: unselfconsciously individual, antic in spirit, its setting a kingdom in miniature where the most mundane landmarks become strange totems.

Such is Calliope Bay - named for the Greek goddess, muse of heroic poetry, who bore Orpheus and taught him to play his lyre - a transfigured version of Hicks Bay near Gisborne, on the East Cape of North Island, where author David Ballantyne spent parts of his childhood and youth in the 1930s and 40s.

Calliope Bay lies on the empty fringe of an isolated region. It is dominated by the ruins of an abattoir built to service the refrigerated ships that transported NZ's meat to the northern hemisphere.

Now, at some indeterminate point in the 60s, it is a macabre and forbidden playground for the few remaining children of the Bay: Harry, his neighbour Dibs Kelly, and Harry's little brother Cal.

Harry narrates events in a voice that is two parts Ginger Meggs and one part Jack Merridew from Lord of the Flies. He bullies his companions mercilessly but has a quick wit, native charm and a penchant for dangerous adventures.

The almost-teen moves through the surrounding landscape of the bay like the scout of an enemy army. By day he tracks the movements of stumpy, sleazy Mr Wiggins, the local butcher, and Sam Phelps, the broken old man who, with his equally broken-down horse, Sydney Bridge Upside Down, does the local goods run. By night he shadows the nocturnal rambles of his skinny, swottish next door neighbour and schoolfellow, Susan Prosser.

The endless summer holiday is interrupted by the arrival of the Emma Cranwell, a ship that delivers Harry's cousin Caroline from the city. Caroline is attractive, older and sexually precocious, and aside from initiating Harry into some teasing games, she sends a palpable shiver through the men of the bay.

This is not Cider with Rosie, however.

Just as the bucolic landscape lies under the slaughterhouse's shadow, Caroline moves beneath the heavy gaze of the adult males around her. Her playful seductions throw Harry.

His cousin is an open door on a dismaying world of adult sexuality, whose fervid atmosphere gives him malarial sweats.

Of course, Harry only has a child's language with which to describe this other world. When he sets out to describe it, his voice takes on an eerie sing-song:

it was amazing, seeing there were so few people in the world, how much could be said about them. Men were always in trouble with their wives about something or other, wives always had something to be unhappy about, husbands were always good fellows in some ways, not in others, somebody was always courting someone else, somebody was always going to have a baby ...

As Harry's language approaches the sexual act it begins to break apart, like a satellite on a graveyard orbit, into mumbles and noise, before breaking up completely.

The awful excitement of Sydney Bridge Falling Down, since it is a thriller of sorts, lies in watching what language a boy who has mainly spoken to other children with his fists will summon in order to defend his cousin from men who are much stronger than him.

One of the hardest things an author can do is be eloquent in representing such profound inarticulacy. Ballantyne controls and exploits the disjunction between what Harry sees and hears and what he understands superbly. The novel starts to gain speed as it heads towards its destination. And as the adult activities around him begin to yield up their secrets this acceleration becomes not only an aspect of the plot but part of Harry's own runaway psychological state.

The final mystery is why Ballantyne's book remained out of print for so long. This, the fifth of eight novels written by the journalist over four decades, manages to be funny, then creepy, then very sad, without any one aspect undermining the others.

It holds in heartbreaking tension that point between innocence and experience, sanity and disarray that we recognise in works as disparate as Iain Banks's The Wasp Factory and Hal Porter's The Watcher on the Cast-Iron Balcony, in which the private catechisms of childhood and adolescence are translated into an adult tongue.

Geordie Williamson is chief literary critic of The Australian.