The unbearable slightness of being

IN his new novel, Demons, Wayne Macauley has ingeniously refurbished an old tale to capture the perplexing vacuity of a generation.

Wayne Macauley channels Boccaccio’s mid-14th century The Decameron in Demons.

WAYNE Macauley has a nose for exposing the zeitgeist. His previous novel, The Cook (2011), arrived in time to skewer Australia’s Masterchef moment as the dictatorship of taste trickled down from the cognoscenti to become a mass culture event. While thousands were probably grateful for the improvement in their home-cooked fare, The Cook deployed a perverse ­Pygmalion story to interrogate the haute cuisine industry, its excesses and bloody obsessions and the kinds of distorted personalities it produces.

In his new novel, Demons, Macauley has ingeniously refurbished an old tale to capture the perplexing vacuity of a generation. Several Melbourne couples go to a beach house for the weekend to escape the rat race. Phones and the internet are banned. It’s an attempt to return to origins, to recharge their batteries and engage with their better selves. Instead of technology, they decide to entertain themselves by telling stories. It’s a refiguring of Boccaccio’s mid-14th century The Decameron, where 10 young women and men escape from plague-stricken Florence and settle in a country house, where they entertain themselves by taking turns to tell stories.

As Maria Tumarkin observed recently in a rather wonderful essay titled This Narrated Life, storytelling is hot at the moment. Adding to the trendiness of first-person documentary radio and the sprouting up of storytelling clubs in some of the nation’s funkier neighbourhoods, storytelling is in vogue as a descriptor for everything from spoken-word performance through to marketing, a mode of narrative delivery that has slow-food appeal while catering to people without the time or powers of concentration to read books.

Macauley’s weekend storytellers are Megan, a documentary filmmaker; her husband, Evan, a musician turned small-scale property developer; Adam, an intellectual property lawyer; his partner, Lauren, who works in advocacy; Leon, a former journalist and former alcoholic who has gone New Age with the cure; and his younger partner Hannah. The final couple are Marshall, a newly elected state Labor MP, and his wife, Jackie, an events promoter, the latter a no-show. They are people who bonded at university and have risen to various heights of their professions and degrees of material comfort.

The venue is the family beach house of Megan and Leon just off the Great Ocean Road out of Melbourne. They arrive on Friday afternoon, get the lamb casserole cooking in the cast-iron pot and begin drinking the top-notch wine. The stories told are interesting in themselves. Oriented towards the tragic, they are mainly tales of people the narrators knew or have heard at one remove.

The true focus of Demons, however, is on the narrative frame, the weekenders and the emptiness of their privileged lives. Macauley paints his characters in an unflattering light. They are introduced to the reader in a flat descriptive tone, desultory sketches with an emphasis on looks and profession that reflects how they make their own social taxonomies. As the wine is drunk and the stories unfold, the framing helps maintain distance.

These characters aren’t escaping the plague, they’re escaping the terrors of the iPhone. We are not encouraged to emotionally identify with them, more to watch and listen as an anthropologist may when learning the lore and rituals of a tribe. The exception here is that the tribe we are listening to and watching is a branch of our own. And what we see and hear is probably not to our liking. It’s the spirit of a generation that took a free education, got incidentally wealthy on property booms, privatisations and res­ources, and largely pissed it up against the wall in the pursuit of new ways to display their status. It’s a collective failure of leadership. As Adam says in a lucid moment to Lauren, in bed after the evening’s storytelling has concluded:

There’s something sad about us, isn’t there? said Adam. Us? said Lauren. I mean how we’ve only ever danced across the surface, had everything our own way, free education, free dole; no wars, no revolutions. We’ve not lived to the limit of human experience, we’ve moved in a little circle. We’ve looked out for ourselves, not others, and if we do make some big magnanimous gesture there’s always something a bit calculated about it. Even when we’re listening to another person’s cares and woes, aren’t we actually thinking about ourselves?

Stop talking, she said and she rolled over and pulled the covers up to her chin. We’re pragmatists, said Adam, idealism’s not our thing. No, said Lauren.

One of Macauley’s great skills as a novelist is his ability to create doubt in his readers’ minds. To call Demons satire, which is how most of his earlier work has been characterised, feels too limiting. He has taken a 14th-century narrative framing device and mixed it with the classic Australian weekend away to produce a fierce and uncomfortable novel about contemporary Australian life that drives us to ask why we are who we are, as it simultaneously makes us wish we were better.

Ed Wright is a writer, poet and critic.

Demons

By Wayne Macauley

Text Publishing, 240pp, $29.99