By Melinda Harvey
FICTION
The Conversion
Amanda Lohrey
Text, $32.99
In contemporary Australia, a conversion is increasingly understood to be something done to a house rather than undergone by a person. Amanda Lohrey’s latest novel aims to reveal the line of connection between the nation’s obsession with home renovation and the desire for spiritual metamorphosis.
Amanda Lohrey continues to be a political writer.Credit:
The Conversion begins with the recently widowed Zoe buying a late-Victorian rural church that her husband spent his final days fantasising about refurbishing: “For Nick it was always about the possibility of the new. The world was there to be remade, over and over, and anything less was stagnation.” Zoe had her doubts whether a church could ever be transformed into a home, but she makes the move, we are told, ″to exorcise a ghost”.
Lohrey’s previous novel had its protagonist Erica overseeing the building of a labyrinth, a structure she believed represented the shape of her life in the shadow of her son’s prison sentence, but also a space that has the potential to unlock a mysterious dimension beyond worldly human misery. In the deconsecrated residential church, Lohrey has landed upon yet another rich spatial form to think and feel her way through.
St Martin’s is Zoe’s home but in some real sense it belongs to everyone who’s ever lived in its vicinity: its building was financed by a leading family of the squattocracy, it stands near the site of a frontier massacre, it has presided over a century of coalminers’ births, deaths and marriages. Zoe’s plan to make the church her domicile is only the latest of its possible becomings, and the novel charts at least two others before it reaches its conclusion.
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Throughout the novel Zoe has a recurring dream featuring Cologne cathedral, whose construction began in 1248 but was only completed in 1880, after which it was bombed and rebuilt, and even now is under constant restoration by resident stonemasons. A church models a kind of permanence in provisionality, and in that there might be a lesson to be had about the nature of survival.
Lohrey continues to be a political writer, even if the overt interest in the Australian labour movement and party politics of her early novels has given away to more esoteric musings that see in the individual’s pursuit of lifestyle and wellness regimes a desire for social change subdued. The Conversion asks: in the absence of a complete re-organisation of society, might certain kinds of spaces, ones that have been created with careful artistry, do the transformative work that heals us as individuals but also unites us, in all our differences, as a community?
For a realist writer, Lohrey is unusually attracted to the unseen. Dreams, the strange ones we have when we sleep and also the ones we plan for when we are awake, propel the action of The Conversion. Midway through the novel Zoe meets schoolteacher Melanie Doyle, who is directing her students in an unlikely production of Strindberg’s A Dream Play. In his preface to that play, Strindberg talks of the power of the imagination to transform the world: “On an insignificant background of reality, imagination designs and embroiders novel patterns: a medley of memories, experiences, free fancies, absurdities and improvisations.”
Ultimately, Zoe needs a little help from others to exorcise her ghost. This exorcism is achieved expeditiously, and indeed the novel’s third act feels rushed. The rich set of possibilities, profound and sinister, installed at the start of the novel are largely abandoned. But this is relative to the conventional novel; Strindberg, too, undid the whole idea of the well-made play. Dream logic does not care about causation and completion.
Instead, we are left with the moving scene of a father and daughter fly-fishing. Zoe wonders why one would go to the trouble to catch a trout only to let it go: “Why hunt if there is to be no kill? The hours of practice, the infinite patience - for what?” She decides that the skill of “the delicate art of casting” is the thing that matters. It is an art that Lohrey has mastered.
Melinda Harvey is Program Coordinator of Literary Studies at Monash University.
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