By Michael McGirr
FICTION
Comfort Zone
Comfort Zone, by Lindsay Tanner.
LINDSAY TANNER
SCRIBE, $29.99
REVIEW BY MICHAEL MCGIRR
Lindsay Tanner was the federal member for Melbourne for 18 years and a minister in the Rudd-Gillard governments. It would be unkind to suggest that this already amounts to a long and distinguished career in fiction.
Comfort Zone is Tanner's first novel, although he has previously published energetic and engaging essays of various sorts. He brings interesting credentials to this new book.
It is not always easy for a writer to bridge the genres of essay-writing and fiction. George Orwell was a superb essayist but, at best, a middling novelist. His greatest work, Nineteen Eighty-Four, is an essay disguised as fiction. Tolstoy on the other hand was a brilliant novelist. But along the way he promoted himself to the status of guru and thereby shot himself in the writing hand. He was wonderful at observing the world. Once he decided he needed also to judge it, the results were mostly tedious.
Lindsay Tanner is neither Orwell nor Tolstoy, which is fine because one of each is sufficient. Comfort Zone is, in many respects, a love letter to the inner-city electorate that Tanner represented. It deals with a long list of the thorny issues that play out in such a diverse and complicated community. The book touches on refugees, ethnic tensions, housing, violence, illegal drugs, legal drugs, merchant banking, chronic fatigue, parenting, famous bars and cafes and a few other things for good measure. If anything, the book tries to embrace a bit too much. But it is held together and sustained by a wonderful warmth and a lightness of touch.
Comfort Zone does not deal with inner Melbourne and its tensions with the intensity of Christos Tsiolkas. It is much closer to the mood to Shane Maloney's Murray Whelan novels. Tanner is not quite as funny as Maloney but he does have his moments. He is deeply fond of his characters and represents their interests with compassion. I hope he did as much when he was their member in real life.
Nevertheless, there is part of Tanner that mourns the changing nature of the inner suburbs, He doesn't forget that his former seat is now held by a Green: "… he did sometimes lament the passing of the old-Carlton scene. The colourful characters were fading into history. The place was now awash with identikit smart young professionals who voted green, made donations to Oxfam, and took little interest in the plight of the genuinely poor living right next to them. Their obsession with house prices was never far below the surface of their supposedly idealistic and environmental social beliefs."
The plot of Comfort Zone revolves around Jack Van Duyn, a middle-aged taxi driver going through male menopause. He has been single for years and lives in an unadorned flat where the bedroom is so unromantic that a naked bulb hangs from the ceiling. Jack has hayfever and smokes in bed. He is also suspicious of people from different backgrounds who have imposed themselves, in his view, on the taxi industry. There is a reason why he's on his own. He says of high-rise public housing "why spend money to protect the tenants from outsiders when the real need was to protect the world from them". Yet, almost unaccountably he coaches a kids' basketball team although he has no children of his own. Perhaps he has a decent heart underneath all that free-floating hostility.
One day, Jack notices a scuffle in a park involving a Somali woman and her son. He gets involved and stands up for the woman whose name is Farhia, going to considerable lengths to re-unite Farhia with a notebook that becomes a source of mystery. Jack develops a crush on Farhia and his heart stirs from hibernation.
There is plenty of intrigue and action but this is a sunny book, full of hope that all the pieces in the puzzle of a big city do actually fit together. Comfort Zone is a comforting book. It knows that some things need to be taken seriously but not as many as we may imagine.