By Carmel Bird
FICTION
The Buried Life
Andrea Goldsmith
Transit Lounge, $34.99
Within the depths of The Buried Life, a weave of poetry, philosophy and music forms a hum, a core which threads its way through the lives of characters who work, live, love in contemporary Melbourne. Once again, Andrea Goldsmith’s signature prose and elegant sense of construction take readers into the hearts of a diverse range of very human characters. I suggest that as you delve into what lies beneath the surface here you might also treat yourself to a Mahler symphony on the sound system, for Mahler is present throughout.
“What sort of person spends his life – his life for god’s sake – studying death?” Such is the question put by academic Tony, one of the nastiest characters you could ever meet. The object of his scorn is Adrian, one of the most likeable, known to his university colleagues as Doctor Death. Adrian, who has written “more than half a million words about death” is writing a book on the “poetry of death”, called Graveyard Lyrics. The title of Goldsmith’s novel is also the title of a poem by Matthew Arnold. The poem explores “whence our lives come and where they go”.
Tony, an academic, liar, and toxic narcissist, has been “writing a novel” – a “rambling and tedious novel” – for the past 15 years. For many years, he has been married to sweet, forgiving, and somewhat deluded Laura, a social scientist. Laura has longed for children; Tony has forbidden them. Chance gently brings Adrian into Laura’s life, and the narrative explores the consequences. Is it friendship or is it romance? True friendship is one of the signature motifs of the novel, with a fourth main character, Keziah, the youngest, as its focus.
From the beginning, you know that somebody, in the course of the novel’s crescendos and dissolves, is going to die. You know it won’t be Tony, but the idea of losing Adrian, Laura, Keziah, in whose lives you are fully invested, is surely unthinkable. Where poetry and music can reach the “faltering soul”, family and religion seem to be generally powerless to help. Adrian sees religion as “fertile nonsense”. In his early childhood, death removed both his mother and father, setting him on the path – although he does not quite realise this – to becoming Doctor Death.
Andrea Goldsmith’s elegant sense of construction take readers into the hearts of her human characters.
Laura is Jewish, but not a believer, and her main connection in the family is with her sister, Hannah, who displays a kind of common sense. Keziah has escaped the fanatical religious community of her family, preserving only some contact with her brother, Luke.
The community is called Crossroads – a name that could describe the places where all the novel’s characters are, to begin with, located. The epigraph to the first chapter is from Heraclitus: “Change is the only constant in life”, and this is, in fact, a leading maxim for the whole story.
Things are set motion when Adrian’s wife deserts him. After the drama of this comes the apparently trivial moment when Adrian and Laura have their first brief casual encounter in a cafe. They discuss choices of cheese – another motif has appeared, and now food takes its place in the tale. “Adrian showed no restraint when it came to cheese.” There is also marinated rockling and spiced-up kale, then chocolate-coated ginger with coffee – not to forget many bowls of chips. Keziah’s name means “sweet-scented spice”.
While Adrian enjoys solitary exploration of such places as the Melbourne General Cemetery, Tony likes to travel the world with his friends. When a fellow passenger dies on the flight home, Tony sees the moment as “a useful incident to put in a novel”, thus revealing his own pedestrian ineptitude as a novelist, as well as his astonishing lack of compassion. Goldsmith mercilessly unveils Tony for the monster he is. It is a miracle that he has not destroyed Laura along the way. Even the sound of Laura flushing the toilet interrupts his “train of thought”.
This is a novel in which sharp contrasts – life and death, good and evil, light and dark, warm and cold, sweet and sour – are skilfully braided as the narrative moves towards its 13 pages of resolution, the artistry of which is moving and quite breathtaking.
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