Amanda Lohrey is a class act

A WORK written almost 30 years ago by an under-appreciated author is Australia's great political novel.

Amanda Lohrey

AMANDA Lohrey is the kind of writer who makes you long for the tide of literary reputation to go out far enough to see who is clothed and who is buck naked.

When word arrived late last year that Lohrey had won the 2012 Patrick White Award - a prize initiated by the Nobel laureate in 1974 to recognise sustained, if under-acknowledged literary achievement - it felt like a belated instance of generational sifting. The Tasmanian novelist, short-story writer and occasional essayist deserves the renewed attention of readers. She is one of the best we have.

But anyone who has happened across Lohrey's 1984 debut novel, The Morality of Gentlemen, will have glimmerings of why the author has maintained a relatively low profile, despite prizes and the respectful admiration of her peers. The work is challenging in form - a mosaic of chapters, formed from multiple narrative perspectives that zoom back and forth in time - and it reveals a subtle political intelligence. Its account of a dockside dispute in Hobart during the long Menzies ascendancy, at the height of Cold War paranoia, withholds pat judgments and provides little in the way of satisfactory narrative closure.

The default tone of this novel is caustic, and its various characters are united only in their flaws. It's also an intensely masculine book, full of terse, sardonic, ribald dialogue and extended rhetorical sallies. Brute physicality shadows these verbal exchanges too, giving the world it describes the jittery, clenched character of a war zone.

And if the broader political sympathies of the author are clear, Lohrey's fiction is ever sceptical of automatically ascribing virtue. It is the opposite of those emollient fictions, written for what Nicolas Rothwell once dubbed "the reading classes", in which liberal conscience is smoothed and stroked.

Instead we're offered a work in which Brechtian cynicism and avant-garde experiment are given intensely local colouration.

The novel's minutely rendered historical detail comes direct from Lohrey's early years. Her childhood in the 1950s and early 60s was spent among Hobart's wharfies and trade unionists, men whose strict value systems and strong sense of community evidently shaped Lohrey's world view even as she hitched a ride with the rising middle class (a decent Catholic education, undergraduate years at the University of Tasmania, a scholarship to Cambridge). The arc of her early life sounds borrowed from a novel by a British kitchen sink realist: Raymond Williams's Border Country, say.

Unlike many escapees from Britain's working class, however, Lohrey had the good fortune to hail from a relatively egalitarian society (though on the evidence of The Morality of Gentlemen, she is not entirely convinced of this).

She was not required to slough off her old skin in order to advance. Rather, Lohrey brought her wider learning to bear on the world from which she came.

The Morality of Gentleman is a vivid recuperation of a particular juncture of the social and political, a celebration of the Australian working class that unfailingly critiques its failures and self-delusions.

I don't know how close to historical events the novel sails. But the narrative has the same confused, ad hoc character we associate with actual incident. The time is one of complacent national prosperity; the political moment is, however, intensely polarised, a point when fear of militant labour was raised to the level of a pathology.

The novel tells the story of Victor Moseley, a dockside worker and union man bought off by conservative elements (or who has sold himself: such are the byzantine political manoeuvrings that we're never entirely sure), who sparks a crisis by refusing to pay his compulsory Labor Party levies. His decision breaks with strict union rules and long-held tradition. It inspires anger and recrimination among the rank and file, and concern among union officials.

Most significantly, it opens the way for a test case designed to break the symbiosis between unions and their political brethren.

Events are described two decades after the fact by a young narrator who attempts, through interviews with the now aged actors in the drama, to reconstruct what took place. This self-described "reliable witness" shoulders in on the narrative from time to time, providing a meta-commentary that, with its privileged future perspective, illuminates the universal bafflement that attends moments of acute social and political conflict. No one can be sure of victory, only that the events set in train by Moseley will have a zero-sum outcome.

This narrator also ventures a retrospective taxonomy of those on the Left - dividing the narrative's veteran campaigners into militants and opportunists, cynics and true believers - and in doing so reveals how fragmented the working class was (and perhaps always is) in the face of concerted efforts from the Right.

Marching in conspiratorial lockstep through these pages are a majestically (if scabrously) reanimated Robert Menzies, captains of industry, the nascent Anti-Communist Party, members of the legal profession, print media and the Catholic Church.

The narrative unfolds in such a way that the bitter irony of the novel's title becomes increasingly clear. The morality espoused by the gentlemen of the establishment is wholly disconnected from ideas of justice or decency. It is a matter of surface only, and even this superficial polish may be abandoned when the entrenched authority of caste, clique or party is threatened. For the ruling class, it seems, the maintenance of power and class prerogative is its sole defining feature.

As for the working men and union officials on Hobart's docks - those radicals, moderates, drunken agitators and oddballs to which the novel devotes most attention - they are revealed to be a fissiparous bunch: capable of extraordinary solidarity at times, yet just as often given to intra-tribal bickering and a paranoia (fully justified in this instance) every bit as fevered as that of those using Moseley to plot against them.

The physical backdrop against which the wharfies federation set about responding to Moseley's challenge is rendered in clear and economical strokes, with the faintest wash of poetic prose for colour.

Yet this world that is created is designed for a more abstract purpose: to capture something of the diffuse, slippery nature of power, the way its apparent agents invariably come with another string dangling above them, held in some more mysterious figure's grip. If Menzies represents the pomp-filled theatre of politics in the emergent modern age, those who support him mainly lurk in the darkness of the wings.

The dock workers, by contrast, are obliged to practise their politics in public. The smoke-filled pubs, the meeting rooms, the wharves become a kind of polis where individual charisma, integrity, intelligence, eloquence, ruthlessness - all the attributes of command - are either displayed or shown to be chimerical.

The author suggests these are not automatically better men than their antagonists. Rather, circumstances oblige them to perform in a proletarian agora, where their ability to persuade is based on character and skill rather than money and force.

No other novel in the slender sub-genre of Australian political fiction - whether authored by Frank Hardy, Vance Palmer, Dal Stivens or Thomas Keneally - so successfully isolates and anatomises how political grassroots operate. There is a extraordinary vigour and thrust to this aspect of Lohrey's story.

Again and again, however, the author disrupts the narrative - tracing with the lead-up to, and prosecution of, a court case, fought against the backdrop of daily waterfront protest, during which individuals from across the social and political spectrum seek to impose their own perspective on events and shape them to their own ends - using literary devices that are defiantly anti-naturalist in effect.

Critic Peter Craven compared The Morality of Gentlemen with the work of American modernist John Dos Passos, and this is surely correct: both he and Lohrey are chroniclers of large events, and both make use of modernist techniques. Lohrey's narrative hews close to the American author's description of an ideal position for the politically minded artist:

A writer in this field should be both engaged and disengaged. He must have passion and concern and anger - but he must keep his emotions at arm's length in his work. If he doesn't, he's simply a propagandist, and what he offers is a "preachment".

But the form that most readily comes to mind in relation to The Morality of Gentlemen is film. Lohrey's fiction has the same fragmentary quality more often associated with the radical documentary experiments of post-revolutionary Russia: cinema that, in the words of the German writer Hans Magnus Enzensberger, "broke through the linear, exclusive and isolating structure of the medium of the book".

We've heard a lot in recent years about the pre-eminence of the neoliberal novel, which, to use the formulation of essayist Erwin Montgomery, is merely "the old bourgeois novel writ large". Lohrey shows a cellular resistance to the cosy, soporific charms offered by such works. Throughout her career - from the ever-so-slightly fantastic future registered in The Reading Group (1988) to the exquisite notations of present-day experience in the stories of Reading Madame Bovary (2012) - she has sought ways of reflecting contemporary life without submitting to the exigencies of the marketplace.

Such adamance is reflected in her interest in male characters and masculine perspectives, and in her willingness to dismantle her fictions when they threaten to relax into agreement with the dominant ideology of the day. She shares with many more commercially successful writers antennae for the issues of the moment but in each instance she has rubbed against the fabric of the new fashion, mussing it up, exposing the shoddiness of its lining.

Christina Stead believed the only way for her to write was with "intelligent ferocity". And, like Stead, Lohrey is allergic to commonplace, disdainful of cant and fascinated by the urban and the domestic. Both writers are natural aristocrats: they can carry off the most unlikely stories, because these emerge from the hauteur of a first-rate mind.

But Lohrey is different in this respect: the ferocity of her fiction does not preclude the possibility of love or tenderness. Her portraits of family life are filled with saving moments, just as the ostensibly cynical perspective on the Australian working class of her childhood is leavened by moments of humour. Her "reliable narrator" may operate from a position of "complicity and cynicism" throughout The Morality of Gentleman, but readers may reasonably suspect this is only to inoculate the idealism to be found in the novel from infection by worldly scorn.

Geordie Williamson is The Australian's chief literary critic. A longer version of this essay will appear in issue 132 of Island magazine, to be published on March 23. www.islandmag.com