Amanda Lohrey’s The Short History of Richard Kline is a witty allegory

IT is immediately apparent that Richard Kline is no clunky everyman but a strange and singular example of his kind.

Amanda Lohrey comes across as a convincing because we know she has one foot firmly on solid ground.

NO literary form has copped more stick in the modern era than allegory. Stories that traffic in symbols perform their task too crudely for our contemporary tastes — they represent the triumph of airy abstraction over real-world specificity. Our preference is for the subtle mimesis of the contemporary novel: a perfect mirror of nature rather than walking emblems of political or moral virtue. Take the best-known example of allegory in Eng Lit, John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress. Its 17th-century cast of Worldly Wisemans and Lord Hategoods, Faithfuls and Hopefuls sounds browbeatingly obvious — and in recent decades Bunyan’s Christian epic has surely been one of the least-read major works in the language.

Yet allegory has never been fully displaced, and it may even be enjoying a revival. The Pilgrim’s Progress recently headed The Guardian newspaper’s list of the top 100 novels written in English, while Rachel Joyce’s Man Booker Prize-longlisted 2012 novel The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry sought to imagine Bunyan’s work in a contemporary British setting.

Now we have The Short History of Richard Kline, which resettles the allegory in Australia and points it towards the mystical East. These are not the only liberties Tasmanian author Amanda Lohrey takes. It is immediately apparent that Richard Kline, whose life from childhood to middle age is the subject of these pages, is no clunky everyman but a strange and singular example of his kind. To this extent he is an immediately identifiable fictional character: plausible and engaging to the degree that he dissents from the social norms of his day.

Richard is not a true rebel, however: more an intelligent boy who fits awkwardly into family life. He describes early years spent ‘‘intently and resentfully within the boundary of the normal, while feeling for most of the time … just outside it’’. Lohrey pinches her narrative pennies at the outset, racing through the years of Richard’s childhood, boyhood, youth in a matter of pages and allowing her creation to report directly to the reader. This mainly first-person narration grants the novel an intimacy and a ‘‘truthiness’’ we associate with the confessional genre, from St Augustine and Rousseau to JM Coetzee.

Like these earlier figures, Richard sounds honest in proportion to his willingness to admit unlikability or poor moral conduct. As he grows to uneasy adulthood, the prickly, wilful child of a middle-class family in suburban Sydney during the 1970s and 80s, what becomes clear is that Richard is sharp-witted, arrogantly aware of his superior intellect but oddly askew, prone to control-freakery.

It turns out that the desire to master his circumstances comes from a sense of lack, not a superfluity of confidence or certitude.

He reports suffering from something like depression but not quite so disabling — more a melancholy sense of incompleteness:

As I grew older I began to reflect. What was this lack, this something missing? And how did I know it was missing if I didn’t know what it was? Did others feel this absence or was it only me? And if the latter, where had I acquired this pathology? And then it occurred to me that there was logic at work here: if there was lack, it followed that there must somewhere be fullness. But how would this fullness, were I ever to find it, manifest itself? What would it look like? Was there a flaw in creation such that it didn’t exist? Or was it the core of some cruel joke: that it did exist but could never be found?

The remainder of the narrative may be unpacked from this suitcase of amplifications. Richard Kline grows to maturity and finds in books, sex, booze, travel and work a series of dampeners for this bass-line disquietude. So fairly normal, after all; what distinguishes him is the intensity of his recurrent dissatisfaction. Most folk exhibit mild existential angst as they head into middle age — Richard comes to feel that a great hole has opened in his 30-something heart. Although health professionals assure him he is suffering from no more than age-appropriate blues, Richard is not so sure:

It had been around the age of seven that I first apprehended that the universe might be a magnificent but meaningless spiral of matter, behind which lay a terrifying void, and beside which any small human gesture was ultimately pointless … But it was also the time when I began to experience that feeling of homesickness, of primeval exile and loss, like a prisoner yearning for freedom. It was as if I had brought this yearning into the world with me, and it was latent in every cell of my being and it had nothing to do with grief. But what was I yearning for?

Even in marriage and fatherhood, those traditional balms for masculine boredom and confusion, Richard suffers from this lack. It is only years later, at 42, during a chance encounter in a suburban hall, that the fierce rationalist and cynic whose working life is spent within the rigorous confines of software coding meets the person who will change his life: a petite, dark-skinned spiritual guru from the backblocks of Chennai.

Curious would-be readers who feel the urge to move on to the next review at this juncture should desist. Yes, this is an account of spiritual awakening. But it is not animated by any proselyting or didactic urge. Rather, it is a creative writer’s effort to make explicable the impulses by which an individual life may overflow its usual boundaries. It is a tribute to Lohrey’s powers as a novelist that she bal­ances the need to paint her creation in three dimensions with the hieratic flatness of spiritual autobiography. Like a Lloyd Rees etching of water or clouds, it is the exactitude brought to the depiction of an ostensibly formless substance that counts.

Lohrey convinces us because we know she has one foot firmly on solid ground. Her first fiction, The Morality of Gentlemen (1984), remains the finest political novel in the slender Australian sub-genre. Just as Aldous Huxley brought a scientific rigour to his experiments with psychedelics in The Doors of Perception — and just as English novelist, translator and critic Tim Parks, famed for his pugnacious opinions, recently applied his fine-grained scepticism to an account of learning to meditate in Teach Us to Sit Still — Lohrey brings all the sober acerbity with which she has judged worldly things to a book about moving beyond them.

The Short History of Richard Kline reminds us that allegory is not the facile or unsophisticated literary form we suspect it to be. The Pilgrim’s Progress was in fact a work in which a marked simplicity of language and tone masked psychological richness, robust humour and wisdom that has outlived a thousand drear theological treatises. The story of Richard Kline is marked by a similarly luminous wit, along with the quiet courage of a mind willing to countenance mysteries that our secular age refuses to broach. It is a novel whose yearning recalls lines by another contemporary author unafraid of the ineffable: American Marilynne Robinson, when she writes in her 2008 novel Home of our

… odd capacity for destitution, as if by nature we ought to have so much more than nature gives us. As if we are shockingly unclothed when we lack the complacencies of ordinary life. In destitution, even of feeling or purpose, a human being is more hauntingly human and vulnerable to kindnesses because there is the sense that things should be otherwise, and then the thought of what is wanting and what alleviation would be, and how the soul could be put at ease, restored. At home. But the soul finds its own home if it ever has a home at all.

Geordie Williamson is The Australian’s chief literary critic.

The Short History of Richard Kline

By Amanda Lohrey

Black Inc, 272pp, $29.99