Australian Gospel novel by Lech Blaine tells compelling family story

Lech Blaine’s first book, Car Crash: A Memoir, was about a tragedy that claimed the lives of three of his friends. His latest is a family saga.

Journalist Lech Blaine’s family memoir Australian Gospel tells a compelling story at a breathless pace. The first of the main characters, the successful, charismatic entrepreneur Michael Shelley, is not related to him, but plays a key role in his family’s life. Shelley is a wandering religious ascetic, the chosen recipient of divine knowledge about topics as diverse as the coming apocalypse, infant nutrition and, of course, the naturally subservient place of women in society.

Michael marries Mary, nee Sydney Jewish socialite Carole Newgrosh, and they have three children together, who they feed and raise according to the tenets of Michael’s revelations.

Michael is an exquisitely recognisable narcissist: charming and seductive, self-pitying and deluded, Messianic and misogynistic. He writes threatening letters littered with random capitalisation.

Michael and Mary menace, belittle, rob and betray the strangers who try to help them. They accuse everyone else of child abuse. When their malnourished eldest son is taken into foster care, they kidnap him from his new home. Their lives become ever more chaotic as they travel around committing colourful and pointless offences for which they are regularly incarcerated in jails and secure mental facilities.

Their three younger children are eventually fostered by an initially childless couple, ocker publican Tom Blaine and his loving wife, Lenore - which is where the author will (eventually ) come in.

Michael vows to track down the Blaines and reunite his family. At this point, an interesting narrative becomes enthralling. I’ll try not to give much else away. The early stages of Australian Gospel can be a bit difficult to follow. Many characters change their names, or have their names changed for them. About a third of the way through, the author is born, into a milieu that is already unavoidably overpopulated with parents, foster parents, social workers, children and an all-star supporting cast of eclectic celebrities.

 

Tom Blaine (Lech’s father) is uncle to Queensland rugby-league star Allan Langer. Michael was a teenage boyfriend of actor Jacki Weaver. Michael’s stepson Roman is the child of Mary’s first husband, the once phenomenally popular actor and singer Lionel Long. Michael and Mary stalk Queensland politicians Anna Bligh and Mike Ahern. Mary even ends up in a prison hospital in Tasmania with mass murderer Martin Bryant.

All of this helps to lend a feeling that Australian Gospel might be a significant Australian story, and it begins to seem strange that the madness of Michael Shelley is not better known.

Lech Blaine makes satisfying use of a variety of sources, particularly the angry, self-aggrandising autobiographical writing sent to him by Michael, but he seems to have chosen to style the book as if it were one long tabloid news feature — full of energy but light on poetry. Hackneyed figures of speech stand out like what Blaine might call sore thumbs.

The prose is generally so literal and unadorned that when characters “come out of the woodwork” or become “part of the furniture”, it brings to mind puzzling images of people who live in skirting boards or change into cushions.

Sometimes Blaine seems unable to hear what he has written — such as when he claims that “Lenore wanted to kill two birds with one stone: a foster daughter, and a biological daughter”.

She certainly did not want to do that.

Another unsettling feature of the writing is its tabloidy salacious prurience. For example, when Mary’s mother begins an affair with a married man, she is taking “the bible’s advice to love thy neighbour literally”.

Lech Blaine’s first book, Car Crash: A Memoir, was about a tragedy that claimed the lives of three of his friends. His latest is a family saga.

When a man marries a “bombshell” then a woman gives birth to a bombshell, the union between mankind and munitions appears complete.

When Michael’s son is born, he knows it’s a boy because “the father spied a penis”.

When Mary gives birth to her daughter, “It had a slit between the legs. ‘It’s a girl!’ declared Michael.”

When Michael’s daughter has her own child “a dented head with black hair appeared between her legs. A long torso followed. Then chubby, olive-skinned legs. A penis between them.”

It’s all a bit weird.

At other times, Blaine shows much greater depth. The book is kind and understanding towards every character. Blaine’s foster siblings are portrayed lovingly but with an affectionate eye to their weaknesses. They interact like a real family. The tensions between them feel true. And although Michael can be horribly and deliberately cruel, Blaine finds in his childhood bogeyman a love that Michael himself cannot properly express.

The increased pace of the latter part of the book plays to the strengths of Blaine’s vigorous style. But in Australian Gospel, the story is the thing — and it’s a story that will stay with its readers for a long time, echoing in their minds whenever they hear the unhinged rantings of a dangerous egomaniac with nothing to offer the world but a wildly misplaced self-regard and furious communications unpredictably disfigured with screaming capital letters.

In a parallel universe, he might have become the leader of the free world.

Mark Dapin is an award-winning author and journalist who thought his family was strange until he read Australian Gospel.