Bleakly fractured fabulism

Miles Franklin-winning novelist AS Patric takes the short story as licence for inexplicable fabulism.

AS Patric ‘possesses a dark turn of imagination’. Picture: Wayne Taylor

VS Pritchett used to say the short story was “something glimpsed from the corner of the eye, in passing”. As a critic and a practitioner of the form, he knew that the angle of creative approach required is different to that of the novel. That larger form needs to be dealt with head-on.

It is a question of scale. Long-form fiction forces the writer to attend to the total architecture of meaning and idea. The author must focus on structure, build it brick by brick. It is the concrete bond of language and idea that substantiates the undertaking, the evolution of character and event across time.

The short story, by contrast, is a lean-to wood-store, a broken window pane, a smoking chimney, rusting ironwork railings, a children’s toy in the long grass of the novel’s back yard. They stand or fall on the quality of mystery or suggestion that can be generated from small, stray details.

But that does not mean anything goes. There should be logic and clarity, even within a mere sliver of narrative. Anton Chekhov could make an epic out of 2000 words because there was a fractal quality to his tales. The fragment contained a whole world; the pencil sketch suggested a complete human drama.

But in AS Patric’s third collection of short stories since 2011, this awareness is not always made manifest. The Miles Franklin-winning novelist instead takes the short story as licence for inexplicable fabulism. At best, these short stories are philosophical thought bubbles, vivid experiments. At worst, they are frail narrative feathers borne up by gusts of purple prose.

Some would dispute this characterisation. They might say that the apparent incoherence of The Butcherbird Stories is evidence of their modernist fealty, an act of narrative weirding in the spirit of Gerald Murnane or his various European antecedents, from Franz Kafka to Serbian author Danilo Kis.

From this perspective, the art in his stories emerges from their instability, their willingness to test the limits of sense.

The Butcherbird Stories, by AS Patric.

And it is fair to say that Patric possesses a dark turn of imagination. In one story, a narrator doing laps in a public pool spots what looks like a severed finger. He passes over it, incredulously, turn after turn. Having determined that the submerged digit is nothing more than a sick joke, the swimmer reaches for the pool’s edge with a bleeding, denuded hand.

In another, the narrator, holed up in a child’s bedroom in a strange house, kept as though a prisoner by an elderly couple, becomes obsessed by the next-door neighbours. In the small-hours aftermath of a party at their home the man breaks in and, having surprised the young son of the household, strangles him.

In story after story, violence, humiliation and general ennui are recast using different characters or milieus. Tiny wormholes start to open between them as images of, say, birds, knives, alcohol or porn­ography begin to pile up.

This is not a jolly collection, though it can press up so close to the edge of determined profundity that it flirts with bathos. Take this, from Dead Sun, in which a husband in Venezuela returns to Australia and his dying wife:

He’d tried to get home as soon as feasible, even so it was months longer than he’d intended. He arrived to find her in a hospital bed, unconscious much of the time; she’d gone from receiving treatment in recovery to being moved to palliative care. Not merely in pain — agonised without the liquid painkiller entering her bloodstream via a drip. Dreamy and soulless in her drug-drowned eyes. Catching a hold of her writhing hands and trying to calm her and wishing he could sink his teeth into her neck like a vampire and suck out the diseased blood that was destroying her body.

The major problem isn’t tone and language, however; Patric is always capable of an elegant sentence; he can set a suitably hectic, anxious, or oppressive mood. It is the fractured, partial, restless nature of his fabulism — a method that shuts the reader off from the possibility of real feeling and insight rather than blowing the doors off their hinges — that diminishes the work.

Among the Ruins, the central and longest story of the collection, begins in a gemutlich prewar Germany and soon takes on the contours of a Berlin-era Nabokov novel: cruelly poised, coldly jocular in tone. It narrates time in the life of one Bruno Kramzer, a professional rogue who is hired to hurt, humiliate and put the fear of God into individuals who have crossed their clients.

It is a potentially rich narrative field, for what begins as breezy if coarse-grained story about a man who damages and is damaged in turn ends as an absurdist version of Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern: Kramzer and his colleagues are ultimately sent to see to a man known only as Josef K.

Yet the registers are so scrambled here — between symbolic portentousness and flat social realism, between historically situated modes of speech and conduct and contemporary mores and idiolects — that the story ends up referring only to itself: to its cleverness and distinct qualities of violence; to its author’s authoritarian hand rather than his creations’ more slippery human fates.

Vladimir Nabokov could get away with this bossy manner of divine creative intervention — just — because he was talented enough to do so. But the gargoyles and grotesques of his stories and novels were only ever created to show that the 20th-century evils of kitsch and totalitarianism had been expelled from the ­cathedral of his art.

Bruno Kramzer and his fellow murderers and tricksters, drunks and abusers undermine the virtues of Patric’s fiction. They make the whole collection feel faintly toxic, as though someone ill-equipped to handle dangerous chemicals had been allowed to store them in his garage.

Nabokov once wrote of Chekhov: “Those bleak landscapes, the withered sallows along dismally muddy roads, the gray crows flapping across gray skies, the sudden whiff of some amazing recollection at a most ordinary corner — all this pathetic dimness, all this lovely weakness, all this Chekhovian dove-gray world is worth treasuring.” Regrettably, the pasty St Kilda tan of The Butcherbird Stories is not.

Geordie Williamson is The Australian’s chief literary critic.

The Butcherbird Stories

By AS Patric. Transit Lounge, 256pp, $29.99 (HB)