David Ireland: man with a mission to mulch

In his first published novel in 18 years, David Ireland provides a chilling antihero for our times.

David Ireland, three-time winner of the Miles Franklin Literary Award.

My manner of thinking, so you say, cannot be approved. Do you suppose I care? A poor fool indeed is he who adopts a manner of thinking for others! My manner of thinking stems straight from my considered reflections; it holds from my existence, with the way I am made. It is not in my power to alter it; and were it, I’d not do so.

— Marquis de Sade, Letter to Madame de Sade (1783)

The story goes like this: in 2004, David Ireland, three-time winner of the Miles Franklin Literary Award, submitted his latest novel to a series of publishers. That work, Desire, was the 300-odd page account of a man entrapped and sexually tortured by a woman he met in a bar. It was a savagely explicit investigation of the relationship between predator and prey, and a fierce indictment of the political and social moment in which it appeared. Everyone who read the manuscript knocked it back. This collective refusal was not just about the novel’s subject matter, however. It reflected a shift in critical opinion towards Ireland and his work that had been building for some time.

A PAIR OF RAGGED CLAWS: Stephen Romei on David Ireland

The violence and misogyny that characterised Ireland’s earlier novels — such as The Glass Canoe (1976) and A Woman of the Future (1979), on which rested his reputation as a defiantly proletarian novelist who employed a feral version of literary modernism — began to erode his standing as intellectual fashions changed in the years after Australia’s bicentenary.

His writing had not altered considerably across time but the hierarchy of values by which such work was judged had. During a period when Ozlit was mainly concerned with the recuperation or celebration of once-marginal literary voices belonging to women, migrants and indigenous Australians, Ireland’s transgressive tales of working-class white blokes rubbed against the weave of the cultural moment. And when harder-edged experimentalism had fallen out of favour, his radical approach to narrative form struck many as rebarbative.

So it was that one of the most consequential Australian literary figures of the 1970s and 80s found himself labouring under the literary equivalent of an Omerta during the 90s and 2000s. Apparently unperturbed, Ireland placed the manuscript of Desire in a desk drawer and kept writing. He did so daily, throughout years in which his backlist fell out of print and his name disappeared from syllabuses, then anthology indexes, then the public imagination. Even after a resurgence of interest in Ireland inspired by the inclusion of his backlist in the Text Classics series, none of his subsequent fictions has been published. Until now.

Though The World Repair Video Game is the most recently composed of Ireland’s 18 years’ worth of ‘‘ghost’’ fictions (his last new work was The Chosen in 1997) it harks back to the beginning of the author’s career. Like The Chantic Bird, his 1968 debut, it tells the story of an outsider who constructs a personal philosophy that runs at widdershins to ‘‘ordinary’’ society and then lives by it, making him a madman or the clear-eyed ruler of a sovereign state. But where that first novel was charged with a young man’s energy, a punkish joie de vivre, this new work is characterised by the calm and quiet maturity of its narrator.

Kennard Stirling, the 42-year-old scion of a rich Sydney family, has a more evolved work ethic than his fictional forebear. Where it was the proud boast of the unnamed narrator of The Chantic Bird that he escaped employment at every opportunity, Kennard spends his days toil­ing on a country block somewhere on the east coast of NSW, regenerating its remnant bushland, returning the land to health. In his spare time he assists the elderly in the nearby town — mowing their lawns, listening to their stories, driving them to doctor’s appointments — while keeping a lookout for unemployed drifters, NINJAS (no income, no job, no assets) whom he subsequently befriends, kills, dismembers and ultimately uses as material for garden compost and walking path concrete.

Here, then, is a cold pastoral: a self-portrait of the psychopath in middle age. Austere in his habits and intellectual in his pursuits, Kennard makes an unlikely serial killer. He does not boast of his exploits; indeed, he evinces a bachelor coyness when it comes to describing his crimes. His first-person accounts of murder are tinged with regret, if not quite compassion. In the three months of journal entries from which the novel is constructed, our narrator even admits a certain distaste for the task (an obsession with cleanliness is problematic when it comes to slaughter). Yet he does it again and again, ­impeccably and conscientiously, like a priest charged with the performance of a ritual that is practised so regularly it becomes second nature: sometimes a chore, sometimes profoundly meaningful, but always done with reverence:

I go to the shed and prepare sand, cement, gravel, milled bone and water in my mixer … then I barrow it up the slope and shape a few more metres of path. Another memorial to a lost sheep gathered into the flesh of the planet, recycled as all of us are eventually. I don’t hate them, I’m just not warmly attached to individuals like them. This is my deliverance from living only to myself, into living and working for the good of others, this is my salvation, to lessen the sum of evil in the world around me.

Kennard does not revel in the thrill and chaos we usually associate with the criminal mind. Instead he folds the most terrible actions into a larger project, methodically undertaken, virtuous in its intent. This project is one with spiritual impulses (see above), ecological aspects (the regeneration of the bush block) and social implications (a utilitarian subtraction of those individuals who lean rather than lift). Its philosophical grounds fall halfway between the anti-humanism of poet Robinson Jeffers and the vaunted individualism of Ayn Rand.

The point of this approach is not to try to justify the narrator’s actions, though that is a by-product of his ponderings, but to describe the creation of a harmonious order fashioned from the various inputs (human or animal, natural or cultural) that Kennard happens across. If we humans are merely ‘‘wet machines’’, then why not use our decaying bodies as part of a permaculture system?

Once again, Ireland has imagined an anti­hero appropriate to our times. Kennard is a deep ecologist in the sense that he does not place humans (or, at least, all humans) at the heart of calculations about the proper use and value of nature. Indeed, those who have previously criticised the author for the determined coarseness of his language will be stilled by the exquisite prose Kennard is granted to describe his private Eden. He relays an unfeigned love of animals and trees that stands quite apart from his pessimistic beliefs regarding the probable ­future of our race.

As with the narrator of The Chantic Bird, Kennard’s creepiness does not emerge from his radical difference from society so much as his complicity with its mainstream impulses. He may be a social isolate these days (albeit a remittance man who lives off regular infusions of family cash), but his sense of the natural order of things was shaped as much by the schoolboy rugby fields of Sydney’s eastern suburbs as his verdant coastal retreat. Bred in the bone is a sense of us and them: those inculcated with ­notions of striving and achievement, and those who are not: “I learned from teachers I respected that human dignity belongs to those who are moral beings.’’ Kennard’s victims are not, in that formulation, ‘‘moral beings’’ and therefore they are surplus to requirements.

The respectable ideology of the Australian upper-middle class is bent into a final solution to the demographic challenges presented by the welfare state.

As we enter into the rhythm of Kennard’s days, witness him planting and tending, playing with his dog Jim by day and listening to Beethoven by night, helping his elders and hunting his victims, the ritualistic quality of the narrative grows ever stronger.

This is not a novel so much as a treatise in the spirit of Spinoza or Wittgenstein, built from the logic of repetition rather than some straight line drawn from A to Z. Like a piece by some minimalist composer, the listening ear grows attentive to the smallest modulations.

This aggregation of lapidary journal entries is perfectly fashioned to represent Kennard’s mental processes. For — and here we are reminded of Ireland’s visionary qualities — the murderer regards himself as ontologically incoherent. He gestures towards some lack, some empathetic absence, and even regards himself (a fictional creation — why wouldn’t he?) as the agent of some external intelligence or force which he calls Pym. Here is an individual for whom the blind striving of evolution, the brute data of consciousness, is not enlivened by care, forgiven by emotion or gathered together by the gravity of human selfhood.

In The World Repair Video Game, Ireland has written an impossible novel: one shriven entirely of the social. Yet in doing so he has revealed the illogic that underlies what we call economic rationalism. He has drawn our coming world in a clear and terrible light.

Geordie Williamson is The Australian’s chief literary critic. This is his foreword to the first instalment of David Ireland’s new novel, The World Repair Video Game, published next week in Island magazine.