Telling it like it isn’t ... quite

Wicked sometimes, often caustic, occasionally savage: this was the guilty pleasure of the Victorian era.

Detail from the cover of A Couple of Things Before The End.

Wicked sometimes, often caustic, occasionally savage: the guilty pleasure of Victorian-era poetry was the dramatic monologue. ­Robert Browning was a genius of the form, though everyone from Elizabeth Barrett Browning to Lord Tennyson had a shot.

The idea was to present an individual voice, one that didn’t belong to the poet, at some telling moment. This character addressed readers as intimates, often presumed to speak on behalf of others, but always offered their version of events. These monologues were shaped and manipulated by the poet to inspire doubt or confusion in readers’ minds. Can what this character says be taken at face value? Are they telling the whole truth or are they taking the mickey? Could it be that they are unwell or damaged, or just barking mad?

It was up to readers to provide those other, competing or contradictory voices; to fill in the gaps. The result could be like catching a magician out in the performance of a trick or completing a knotty cryptic crossword. It could also lead to dawning horror, a sense of malevolence lurking behind the elegant mask of words.

Melbourne-based Sean O’Beirne’s debut collection of short fiction takes the dramatic monologue and dresses it in a contemporary, local wardrobe. Its stories are mainly brief, first-person accounts, whether addressed to a lone interviewer or large audience. What they have to say may be given grudgingly to an analyst or willingly dictated to a tape recorder, or left dangling, plaintively, on an answering machine. Emails, text messages, online comments, tweets: all the new means we have for communication and miscommunication are deployed here, even some not invented yet, but with the old creative tactics.

Sometimes, especially early on in the collection, these monologues are wry, low-key, gently comic. The opener, Scout, for example, takes the form of an interview with a middle-aged Australian recalling his early teen years, during the 1970s, as member of the exceedingly motley Eighth Bundoora Scout Troop. We experience the shock of recollection alongside the unnamed man: the oddity of those small, serious rituals — the badges! the knots! — and a flooding awareness of how mores and attitudes have changed over time (“who gives a couple of fourteen-year-olds guns and says, ‘Boys, go for a walk’?”)

Sometimes the stories work more like footnotes. The splendid Homage to Barry Humphries takes the form of diary entries from a sea-voyage, undertaken in 1958, by a young woman setting off from Melbourne to make her way as an actress in London.

On the ship with her is a young man she knows, slightly, from university rep: the great man himself, though at this point young, charming, drunken and dangerously callow. The shipboard affair that follows is recorded with such one-sided economy that their sexual encounters are suggested by no more than a double asterisk, alongside postage costs and notes about a quest for new sandals.

Other pieces can be defiantly non-sequiturial, as in A Night With the Fellas, where, in a speech to a men’s club, a young man named Josh White accepts the kind of challenge made by mental health charities these days, to “share”. The story that follows, culled from a pornographic paperback found in his mother’s bedroom years before, is hilarious, shockingly prurient and utterly bereft of the therapeutic benefits meant to ensue from such personal revelation.

By now, a pattern has formed. These stories are particularly (though not exclusively) interested in Australian masculinity — the ways in which the codes and cliches it speaks through disguise dark fathoms of bewilderment, fear, greed, lust and self-loathing.

Extended into the political realm, such blokey utterance can be weaponised and take on a sinister cast. In a press conference by one Michael Ray in the aftermath of a federal election in which his openly xenophobic New Australia Party scores surprising, balance-of-power success, O’Beirne manages to out-Trump Donald Trump in terms of bombast, indirection and veiled threat. But it is the failures of self-knowledge that characterise these voices, the inconsonance between humane conduct and self-justifying formulae, a willed ignorance that presents as pure innocence, that gives a very disparate collection narrative arc.

Funny as O’Beirne can be — and clever, too, in his manipulation of unliterary forms to literary ends — he has a deadly serious point to make. From asylum-seekers on Nauru to suburban Melbourne in the grip of near-future climate collapse, the worst we have done, are doing, or are set to do as a society emerges from an inability or unwillingness to align our public rhetoric with private action.

The Victorians were superlative hypocrites, which is why Robert Browning’s dramatic monologues packed such punch. How unfortunate, then, that O’Beirne’s updated versions succeed so marvellously in this place at this moment. Collectively, they suggest things would be greatly improved if we followed Browning’s admonition — to “be yourself, imperial, plain, and true”.

Geordie Williamson is The Australian’s chief literary critic.

A Couple of Things Before the End

By Sean O’Beirne. Black Inc., 208pp, $27.99