The Wonder Lover: Malcolm Knox’s most complex work

Malcolm Knox has created a jewelled puzzle box in The Wonder Lover, his most complex novel to date.

Author Malcolm Knox.

‘With each new woman that a man is attracted to,” muses the narrator of Ford Madox Ford’s novel The Good Soldier, “there appears to come a broadening of the outlook, or, if you like, an acquiring of new territory.”

John Wonder, the man at the heart of Malcolm Knox’s fifth novel, shares some essential features with Captain Edward Ashburnham, the good soldier of Ford’s book. He, too, is a man of rectitude and impeccable decency, aside from a propensity to adultery that he indulges in secretly and on a reckless scale. And he is similarly undone, after years of what might be regarded as success, by a love affair with a much younger woman — one that happens to be chaste, in deed if not in tormented thought.

While The Wonder Lover shares some broad affinities with Ford’s Edwardian classic — borrowing the bruised, bitter tone of that work, its knotty retrospective unfolding, its air of spreading scandal — Knox’s book has its own concerns. There is nothing serial about John Wonder’s amours since he is a trigamist, a man with three wives. Nor is there anything predatory about his behaviour, regardless of the damage he ultimately causes. Instead he is the passive participant in an unfolding tragedy, the sole voyeur of his own unravelling. He does not acquire new territory so much as submit to the conquest of his own.

The time and place of the novel’s setting are suitably soft-focus: somewhere about the here and now. Yet everything else is prosecuted with the utmost empirical rigour. John Wonder is an authenticator; his job is to travel the world and ensure that facts regarding records — records of the Guinness Book kind — are verifiable and true. As a man he hews in all respects to this idea of dispassionate objectivity. Wonder is a signal instance of the human median, and his bland looks, beige personality and ostensible sexlessness are an invisibility cloak.

But in a world where the vigorous self-promotion of masculinity is the dismal baseline of politics, sport, business, media and so on, Wonder’s blankness has its attractions. Sandy, his first wife, a cancer researcher, appreciates her husband for his quiet kindness and support. He cares for their children, Adam and Evie, with love and attentiveness, enthralling them with bizarre facts and impossible stories. For the one week a month he is home, that is; the remainder of his time is spent with two other wives, based in different cities on different continents, each with two children also named Adam and Evie.

It is a primary aspect of the novel’s oddity that Adam and Evie — all three pairs of children — narrate Wonder’s story. They are a Greek chorus emerging from a single mouth. Their perspective is omniscient and their narrative recollective; they look back at a man they loved, still love, but who has shaped their lives in powerful ways through his deceit:

There must, our father realised, be an infinite number of ways for a man such as himself to get caught out, and therefore an infinite number of details of which he must keep track and possibilities for which he must be ready. The porousness of the walls in the human heart is the natural state; it is sealing up the porousness which is unnatural, which kills a man, and our father, as he grew older, was fighting a battle that, it must have dawned on him, he was not going to win.

Their voice is cool yet feeling, generous yet mannered, and prone to simile, metaphor and capsule description:

Menis had a whiskey-bruised voice and a face the colour of almonds, except for crows feet that spoked out of the tails of his eyes, wrinkles a poignant white against the browns of his skin, as if he done all his smiling in the days when he was out in sunshine.

The man described is Menis Economopoulos, an elderly lawyer who has lived under house arrest for many years because of his threats to kill an even older woman who lives in a lakeside home nearby. Her name is Dorothy O’Oagh, and she holds the title of the world’s oldest woman. Each year John Wonder visits the supercentenarian, witnesses a doctor prove that her heart is still beating, then goes on to visit the man who, due to a decades-old tax-minimisation arrangement, is the proper heir to her home. It is Mrs O’Oagh’s stubborn refusal to die that so incenses Menis.

During one visit Wonder notices, as if for the first time, Menis’s daughter, Cicada, and is stricken by her beauty. Though by then he has married three times, in her he sees “the grail for which he has been searching had been in front of his eyes if not every day, then one day a year”. The narrator/s compare their father to Australia in 1787, “sheltered, contained, isol­ated, in perfect and more or less eternal equilibrium. He was ripe for invasion and heartbreakingly vulnerable to new strains of disease.” And they go on to explain that Wonder’s downfall arises from the fact the man with three wives now falls in love for the first time.

This knowledge is given to the reader early on. In the coming months and years, as Wonder stretches himself beyond already stretched limits to bathe in the proximity of Cicada’s beauty — all the while maintaining his multiple domestic fictions — the narration circles back to fill in numerous blanks. How did such an ordinary man find himself married for a second time, let alone a third? What appalling logistics does his situation demand? How long can he keep the effort up?

It is the pressures arising from that last question that quicken the story. A narrative spoiled at the outset is granted drama as a result, while an apparently sordid tale takes on a tragic aspect. “He was”, for all his flaws, “a middle-aged man worried, like all middle-aged men, that he had seen too little of life, hoping to grasp a last taste before the long winter set in”. This is what raises the novel above its base materials: Knox’s authorial generosity. For all the damage Wonder does, his creator places just enough thumb on the scales that we cannot bring ourselves to condemn him entirely. This is a matter of technical mastery as much as empathetic imagination. By careful manipulation of chronology the author foregrounds some crimes and withholds virtuous acts; he dives deep into Wonder’s frantic thoughts while maintaining a tactical distance to his wives.

Knox has created a jewelled puzzle box in these pages. It is by some distance his most complex novel to date. Think of Martin Amis’s The Zone of Interest or John Banville’s The Infinities, works where formal experiment unfolds into something more feeling, more implicated in the world. What can be gleaned from John Wonder’s story is a sense of how much our relationships are driven by an unassuagable sense of lack.

As Ford put it a century back: “We are all so afraid, we are all so alone, we all so need from the outside the assurance of our own worthiness to exist.”

Geordie Williamson is The Australian’s chief literary critic.

Malcolm Knox will be a guest of the Sydney Writers Festival, May 18-24.

The Wonder Lover

By Malcolm Knox
Allen & Unwin, 384pp, $32.99