For one of Australia's pre-eminent men of letters, Rodney Hall travels lightly. Look into his black shoulder bag and you'll simply find a 3B pencil fixed to an octavo notebook with an elastic band. These days it's all the writer needs for his mobile office, as his best tool is a superbly exercised imagination. Ever since the then aspiring young poet left Brisbane for a 10,000-km walking trek around the Mediterranean almost 50 years ago, Hall has worked best off the leash. Much of his creatively vast colonial trilogy, which began with 1988's Captivity Captive and ended with the 1993 Miles Franklin Award–winning The Grisly Wife, was written from notes made while Hall walked his dogs at his beloved headland home on the far south coast of New South Wales. His most recent novel, The Last Love Story (2004), was another peripatetic affair, penciled between coffee shops in Melbourne and Berlin. "If you live long enough, and I seem to have lived an awful long time, you accumulate things," says the sociable Hall, 71, who also happens to be a skilled baroque recorder player, actor and director. "I'm one of those people who have to go out and do things. The idea of being closeted in a study like Proust is to me just a nightmare."
With his books, Hall is similarly incapable of being restrained. And in an age when reports of literature's demise are a constant dirge, Hall has helped keep the novel alive with his own wildly unpredictable outpourings. From meticulously researched historical sagas to dystopian futurism (Kisses of the Enemy), parallel universes (The Last Love Story) and magic realism (The Island in the Mind), the thrice Booker Prize–nominated novelist has surfed genres seemingly at random. Hall is an automatic writer in the Surrealist sense, giving vent to his dark subconscious. So it hardly comes as a surprise when the author stops to admire a graffiti-scribbled wall, against which Time's photographer decides to shoot him. "The way I work, anything that looks like a plan you can be damn sure it's actually an accident," Hall says. "I love accidents. I love things taking sideswipes and the world intruding."
In August of 2005, the world intruded in a way the author could never have imagined when his house at Bermagui burned to the ground. Partly caused by a faulty gas line, the inferno spared little—"there were twisted metal things for the fridge and the gas stove," Hall recalls, "but other than that there was just nothing, just ash." While the eldest of his three daughters, the house's sole occupant at the time, escaped, part of Australia's literary heritage was not so lucky. Gone were many of Hall's slavishly hand-written manuscripts and letters, including his lifelong correspondence with English writer Robert Graves. Fire couldn't erase Hall's favorite memories of the place, including a visit from Salman Rushdie at the height of his fatwa, but recently his family made the difficult decision to put the property on the market after 32 years. "What we couldn't face was the shell of the house without all the things that made it what it was," he explains. "If you built it again, it would almost be more painful than just keeping it in memory."
If anything, Hall has emerged from the flames a finer writer. Begun well before the blaze, his new novel Love Without Hope (Picador; 269
pages) carries the spirit of regeneration that comes after loss. Here the landscape of "hearty little horsewoman" Lorna Shoddy is also transfigured by fire. "A bell of silence clapped itself down over the blackened trees and turf," writes Hall, "her world curling at the edges and noiselessly crepitating, little spits of silence dodging among the ashes." Stripped of her beloved Australian Waler horses, and without the support of family, Mrs. Shoddy is reduced, by all appearances, to madness. At 73 she finds herself straitjacketed in a country psychiatric ward where "the only freedom to move is in the memory." This returns in fits and starts, but is sustained by the rekindling of her love for a husband who left her 23 years before.
Among other things, Love Without Hope is about duty of care: society's, for strangers like Mrs. Shoddy who hover beyond town fringes; and the reader's, for a character worthy of compassion and completion. Despite seemingly absurdist and sardonic elements, the novel is simpler and less fanciful than Hall's previous ones. It is set in 1983, when in N.S.W. there did reign a Department of, and Master in, Lunacy. And even today one doesn't have to travel far to find larger-than-life Country Women's Association presidents, murderous property developers or delusional district nurses. These, of course, are the dark characters Hall employs to keep Mrs. Shoddy's sanity at bay (most memorable of all, there's a big black bull that materializes from the fog). But as in the Robert Graves poem from which the novel takes its name ("… as when the young bird-catcher/ Swept off his tall hat to the Squire's daughter,/ So let the imprisoned larks escape and fly"), Hall's dark vision is lit by a transforming lyricism, with bravura passages that can take the breath away. This is Australian writing worth caring about.
It might seem as eccentric as Mrs. Shoddy in this globalized age, but Australian literature is something Hall still cares passionately about. He rallied for the cause as Prime Minister Paul Keating's chair of the Australia Council for the Arts, but his most powerful argument in its defence is his own writing. From The Island in the Mind's 17th century Frenchman, who invents Terra Incognita as an opera, to The Day We Had Hitler Home's Audrey McNeil, who, with her hand-held camera, invents Europe as a movie, Hall's novels comprise what he calls "a seven-part metaphorical history of Australia." His next, to be set in the Brisbane his family discovered on emigrating from England when Hall was 12, is, like the nation, a work in progress. "No country lives with its whole history," he says. "We only live with the stories we choose to tell." In Hall's blackly comic and underrated Hitler (2000), these stories now include a mustard gas-blinded future Führer who staggers off an Illawarra and South Coast Steamship Company boat in 1919, making fiendish fun of "the fact, universally acknowledged, that nothing ever happens in Australia." With his finely fervent
fiction, Rodney Hall proves that isn't so.
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