Les Murray's verse novel traverses the evils of a madcap century--and revives an epic tradition

By MICHAEL FITZGERALD

"ou are about to do something you have never done before," the blurb reads. "You are about to read a poem 264 pages long." First published in Australia in 1994, Dorothy Porter's verse novel The Monkey's Mask became a surprise bestseller, making verse seem sexy, fresh and new again.

It also threw down the gauntlet to Australia's premier poet, Les Murray, winner of last year's T.S. Eliot prize. Not to be outdone, Murray has produced his own novel in verse, outstripping Porter's by a page. But unlike The Monkey's Mask, Fredy Neptune (Duffy & Snellgrove) is less interested in fashioning something new than in resurrecting traditions of old--in this case, the epic poetry of Homer's Odyssey and Byron's Don Juan. Dedicated "To the glory of God," Murray's hugely ambitious saga attempts nothing less than to illuminate the darkness at the heart of our century.

Its Ulysses is Fredy Boettcher, a German-Australian merchant sailor who is sent to sensory purgatory for 30 years after seeing a group of Turkish women immolated during World War I: "No pain, nor pleasure. Only a ghost of that sense/ that tells where the parts of you are." Instead his walking corpse must wander through the moral vacuum of two world wars, impotent to allay the horror he sees but can't touch.

In a century desensitized to suffering and evil, Murray wants us--through Fredy --to feel history anew. The approach he takes is darkly comic, though the picaresque romp that ensues owes more to Forrest Gump than Don Quixote. Shifting personae from horse-breaker, German officer and circus strongman ("Freddy Neptune") to Hollywood extra, zeppelin rigger and Jewish fugitive, Fredy pops up Zelig-like with Banjo Paterson ("he'd more the way about him/ of a bush-town solicitor"), Marlene Dietrich ("I know poetry and starvation and cold cuts," she tells Fredy) and Hitler, with "his drink-waiter bashed-child salute."

Over this teeming, mad-hatter's-tea-party narrative, Murray provides a frequently brilliant travelogue in verse, with images that resonate like birdsong: Before its firestorm, Dresden is "narrow and high and carved in walnut stone,/ shining with glass and money"; the Nile is "the colour of an AIF tunic"; while New Guinea's Kokoda Trail is "a mad giant's teapot...shit, steam and wet leaves;/ you crawl up the spout and down."

As a novel, however, Fredy Neptune labors under the weight of a B-movie plot. A 60-page section set in the U.S. during the Great Depression seems a distraction, while the massacre that triggers Fredy's odyssey is written off in a few lines. Another problem is Fredy himself. Despite his cartoonish antics, he remains curiously indistinct, "this awful blank secret me." In a work so intent on making history touchable, it's difficult to engage with a hero this anesthetized.

For him--and the reader--it's a long, hard journey in search of feeling. And when it finally comes for Fredy, it's like "how a kicked toe delays its pain for a second, and then pounces." As page-turners go, Fredy Neptune often creaks and strains. But it also contains poetry that rings painfully true.