ANZ LitLovers LitBlog

One of the aspects of getting older that’s a bit eerie, is finding that part of your life has become ‘the olden days’.  Initially, my idea of ‘the olden days’ was that era when my parents were children and young adults, a time that they would evoke with nostalgia (or otherwise).  Then, emerging with self-mockery but solidifying into nostalgia (or not), ‘the olden days’ become the years of my own child- and young adulthood.  But what’s really spooky is when the years of The Offspring’s child-and young adulthood have become ‘the olden days’.

Though they’ll enjoy it just as much, I suspect that the generation after mine will read Stephen Orr’s new autobiographical novel somewhat differently to me.  This Excellent Machine was a revelation, because The Offspring was (just like his parents) immune to popular culture.  So whereas most parents were dragged into 1980s culture by their children, I wasn’t.  Orr’s book is a ‘foreign country‘ to me.  It’s like reading about a tourist attraction you missed seeing while you were on a once-in-a-lifetime trip.

Orr is one of my favourite authors: I’ve read all but one of his seven novels, and he is a genius with characterisation and setting. In This Excellent Machine Clem Whelan is the central character, trapped in the Sunnyboy summer of 1984 and wondering what to do with his life.  When he quizzes his mother once again about his long-absent, best-forgotten father, he knows the script even before they start, and eventually he recognises the pattern:

I’d had enough.  She was like a mower starting on a very big paddock.  (p.85)

*Ouch!*

There is a conspiracy of silence about this absent father.  Clem lives in a close-knit street in a working-class suburb of Adelaide.  (Only, most people are not working, except in backyard ventures or casual, pointless jobs.  The 1980s was when people started to find out what globalisation really meant).  Everyone knows everyone else, and people rarely move away so the neighbours remember Clem’s birth and early childhood.  And they remember his father, but they keep schtum about it too.  Clem has reached the age where he needs to know, mainly because he is in search of a mentor to guide him through his difficult last year at school.  He’s not sure it’s going to be worth it, and his teachers, ground down because of the hopelessness of their students’ future, aren’t much help.  Pop’s advice is to knuckle down but Clem thinks it might be too late:

It seemed stupid to reduce life to a tertiary entrance ranking, but that’s how it was.  Your brain produced a number, the number got you into university, this got you a good or boring job.  There were more of the latter than the former, so you had to work hard and take advantage of every opportunity. (p.282)

He likes the art teacher, Nick, but Nick doesn’t last because his anarchic attitudes get him on the carpet in the principal’s office, just like any naughty schoolboy.  OTOH Mrs Masharin believes in Clem’s talent as a writer but his judgement of her is harsh:

Mrs Masharin was our own commissar, Soviet discipline made word in the Gleneagles Steppes. Short skirt and unforgiving pantyhose, knee-high boots (always polished) and an industrious shirt; hair up (bun narrowly avoided) and a slight accent that could’ve been anything European, but we were so white-bread we didn’t know.  She looked at me and said, ‘Nice big voice.’ Each word separate, in her usual permafrost accent. (p.357)

The occasion for using a ‘nice big voice’ is when Clem’s writing is featured in a broadcast on the school’s radio station (known not so affectionately as Radio Bogan).

The new radio station (Mr de Weerd’s idea) had started broadcasting across the school grounds every Monday, Wednesday and Friday at recess and lunch.  Light classics, mainly, courtesy of Ms Field’s expansive Comoesque record collection, but the powers that be had conceded, allowing a pop segment (Spandau Ballet, Boy George), an electronic music corner (there were other Kraftwerk fans) and Mrs Masharin’s literature salon.  (p.357)

Even the minor characters are vivid portraits of humanity:

Dwayne Schuit had been made producer.  He sat in a control desk outside the studio.  Dwayne of the Komputer Klub (‘Fun Programming in Basic’), debating and chess club.  Dwayne, who’d missed out on a private education, but wore a tie and jacket to school anyway.  Quoting Python ten years before anyone else; topping Year Eleven Latin (narrowly beating Curtis) and Classics, making it clear he wanted to study arts.  (p.358)

Alas, the radio program also features an aggrieved ex-girlfriend. Clem’s best mate Curtis had, in a romantic moment, given this girl a photograph of his backside, 500 copies of which she has previously plastered all over the school ground.  (Remember those instant photo booths?) Tracey has reason to be very angry with Curtis, and she isn’t finished yet.  When Mrs Masharin asks her to talk on air about the book she’s been reading, her voice rings out all over the schoolyard and beyond, with her summation of a book called ‘Glory Days’… about a young girl, and she stupidly falls for a boy called Curtis. Invited to say more, Tracey continues” ‘In today’s world a girl needs to be careful.  As this book shows, many boys care only for one thing.  Curtis Durell is such a boy.’  You can guess the rest…

So there are laugh-out-loud moments, but also poignant sequences where Clem learns that his initial judgements of people aren’t always fair, and that sometimes there are heart-rending reasons why people do rather odd things such as knitting 17 identical jumpers in all different sizes.

I really enjoyed losing myself in the pages of this book.  Because Clem’s been shielded from the kind of world his father represents, anticipation propels the reader along as the quest to learn about his father intensifies. But it’s his plans to help his ageing Pop find Lasseter’s Reef that are most compelling…

Pop, a backyard mechanic who’s supported the family throughout Clem’s lifetime, is succumbing to dementia.  He’s struggling to remember the sequence of car parts for the repairs he does, he goes wandering and gets lost, and he fumbles for words he known all his life.  But Pop’s fixation on finding the reef, his insistence on keeping the search secret, and his growing inability to foresee consequences is what really ramps up the narrative tension.  Even if you haven’t read T.G.H. Strehlow’s harrowing Journey to Horseshoe Bend, which Pop references to inspire Clem into similar loyalty, the idea of this teenage boy (who keeps failing his driving test) and his grandfather setting out into the harsh South Australian outback in an ageing Datsun 120Y makes for a page-turning experience.

You can read an extract here.

Image credit: Datsun 120Y (Sunny B210), Markmastro, public domain, Wikipedia

Author: Stephen Orr
Title: This Excellent Machine
Publisher: Wakefield Press, 2019, 482 pages
ISBN: 9781743056134
Review copy courtesy of Wakefield Press

Available from Fishpond (This Excellent Machine); direct from the publisher and all good bookstores.