The Teetotaller's Wake

By Carolyn Van Langenberg, Briar Hill: Indra Publishing, 2003, 230 pages, paperback, $22.95. Reviewed by Zora Simic in the June 2005 issue.

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Carolyn Van Langenberg gives good title and it's only now, having just finished her ambitious trilogy of novels -- Fish Lips (2002), The Teetotaller's Wake (2003) and Blue Moon (2004) -- that I fully appreciate this particular skill. Looking back, they tell me everything and nothing I need to know about what happens between the covers. The titles evoke the author's key preoccupations -- families, dreams, cultural encounters, passion, love, sexuality, grief, nostalgia, location, dislocation -- without giving too much away. Indeed, Van Langenberg is all about the slow unravelling of a story, a person, a life, a country, a century. She invites readers to make connections between people, between countries (specifically Australia and Malaysia) only to destabilise or reinvent them. At times, particularly in Fish Lips, this elusiveness was distracting, threatening occasionally to undermine the careful characterisation and emotional precision of her inter-linked stories with a layer of meta-fiction that had thankfully all but disappeared in the second book, the strongest of the three. But in hindsight Van Langenberg's lapses into reflexivity are easily forgiven, given that she had answered her key question -- what narrative forms are best equipped to capture the slippery-ness of the past -- so emphatically. The answer of course is fiction.

Van Langenberg's trilogy then stakes a claim for fiction, which is refreshing in these non-fiction obsessed times, and convincing too. Music and cinema offer persuasive cases, but are aides, rather than conduits for conjuring the past. As for the discipline of history itself, it gets a bashing in early depictions of Gillian Hindmarsh, one of the author's key characters. We meet Gillian when she's in Malaysia in the 1980s, researching her PhD on the Saracen and Chinese influences on the design of modern public buildings in Malaysia. This is precisely the sort of esoteric topic lampooned in contemporary discussions on the efficacy of tertiary research, though the author uses it not to satirise the modern university and its obsessive occupants, but rather to suggest the limits of empathy in the historian. By focussing her historical gaze on buildings and in archives, Gillian, we are frequently and not too subtly told, misses all the clues right in front of her. But there is no escaping them. The Rose we meet in the very first line -- 'Rose will be remembered' -- begins to haunt her dreams after Gillian liberates her photo from the archives. This haunting is one of several, the implication being that the past will have its way, no matter how much you try to repress it. This is Van Langenberg's uber-point and she makes it well, though the initial opposition between capital 'H' history and proper historical understanding was largely ineffectual. Gillian's later reluctant estrangement from her subject suggests an alternative reading of the discipline's possibilities, which is an example of the quiet pleasures of reading the trilogy -- nothing is signed, sealed or delivered. So what we have are postmodern novels obsessed with modernity, in particular the way in which selves are fractured by time, space and place and whether it is possible to put them back together again or even to represent them at all. And in keeping with the author's consistently nuanced approach, the answer is sometimes yes (as with Fiona Hindmarsh, the lesbian heroine of book two) and sometimes no (the forever elusive Rose, who tastes love, but dies before she gives birth -- a mixed blessing if you consider the fate of other mothers in the trilogy).

The books are also post-colonial novels about colonialism. From her two main focus points -- Penang City in Malaysia and Newrybar on the north coast of New South Wales -- Van Langenberg unpacks at least a century of colonising expeditions of various sorts (there's the obvious ones such as war, and the less obvious instances -- westerners going 'East' to find themselves) and the personal traces of these encounters. We learn of the impact of colonial policies on everyday life, though never in a heavy-handed way, proving yet again fiction's beguiling powers. We also begin to understand the horror and sometimes the futility of displacement -- I have in mind here the Bandjalung spirits that continue to haunt the land white settlers have occupied and claimed and also the sad exile of Jacqueline Dark, cousin to the Hindmarsh girls, who is doomed to carry her miserable past with her, though not for want of trying to escape it. Movement across countries and to cities can also be liberating, though 'coming home' is never straightforward. This messy business is conveyed most poignantly and honestly in The Teetotaller's Wake, where the Hindmarsh daughters return home for the funeral of their mother Muriel. It is fitting that the middle book should be the most cohesive and direct, for this seemingly small story of a journey home, the funeral and the insufferable wake, is so successful in its dissection of grief and its associated soul-searching that it anchors the first and last books with a real persuasive power. It does this by reminding us that at the centre of historical events, colonial outposts and reinvented nations are men and women, children, siblings. These relationships, and their details, are Van Langenberg's great strength.

Blue Moon is at least a hundred pages longer than the previous two novels and necessarily so. Malaysia is almost an apparition in Fish Lips, though most of the action takes place there. It was as though the author, like her central characters at that point in their lives, couldn't quite capture the place. In the second book, it is reduced to a postcard sent by Uncle Sid, who resurfaces, along with a cast of various exiles, travellers, locals, colonial bureaucrats and rising entrepreneurs, in Blue Moon. Van Langenberg zeroes in on Malaysia in the hazy and corrupt 1990s and also the fading days of colonial rule before independence in 1956. We begin to understand Malaysia's allure and its decay and its special attraction to colonials eager for new sensations, whether they be sexual, culinary, cultural or otherwise. By extension, for Australian readers at least, our own country and its white history is illuminated, in particular its stifling insularity. But to the author's credit the gaze is never one-way. A song wafting through rooms that have seen better days, or a scene from an era-defining film may capture a moment, but it is up to fiction to draw it all together, resisting conclusions and asking only to appreciate the connections and ruptures that pass between us.

Citation

• Zora Simic. 'Review: The Teetotaller's Wake by Carolyn van Langenberg' [online]. Network Review of Books (Perth, Australian Public Intellectual Network), June 2005. Availability: <please cite the web address here> ISSN 1833-0932. [accessed 06 September 2010].

Back Cover Blurb

• No rueful irony and postmodern games for Carolyn van Langenberg. She embraces and describes the world with full-on passion, sensuousness, a deep sense of history and place, and a delicious sly humour.
  
  With this novel, The Teetotaller's Wake, van Langenberg leaves Penang, the setting for Fish Lips, her first novel in the trilogy about the Hindmarsh clan, for the lush north coast of New South Wales. The Hindmarsh matriarch has died, and Fiona, one of the 'clever' Hindmarsh girls, returns to the farm of her childhood for her funeral and is soon awash in copious amounts of tea, intrusive relatives, and disturbing memories.
  
  Through Fiona, van Langenberg excavates with sympathetic accuracy the midden of complicated reactions that members of the rural diaspora can experience on returning home. As one of those members, I was completely engaged by van Langenberg's candid depiction of the vanity and embarrassment of those who leave and the incomprehension toward them of those who stay, all wrapped in an awkward bundle of family love and loathing.

Have You Also Read?

• Fish Lips
  
  Carolyn van Langenberg, Briar Hill: Indra Publishing, 2001, 200 Pages, Paperback, $29.95
  Reviewed by Zora Simic in the June 2005 issue.
  
  Carolyn Van Langenberg gives good title and it's only now, having just finished her ambitious trilogy of novels -- Fish Lips (2002), The Teetotaller's Wake (2003) and Blue Moon (2004) -- that I fully appreciate this particular skill. Looking back, they tell me everything and nothing I need to know about what happens between the covers. The titles evoke the author's key preoccupations -- families, dreams, cultural encounters, passion, love, sexuality, grief, nostalgia, location, dislocation -- without giving too much away. Indeed, Van Langenberg is all about the slow unravelling of a story, a person, a life, a country, a century. She invites readers to make connections between people, between ... read more.