Toccata and Rain

By Philip Salom, Fremantle: FACP, 2004, 302 pages, paperback, $24.95. Reviewed by Jean-François Vernay in the September 2004 issue.

Help more readers find out about this article
Slashdot   Digg   StumbleUpon   Del.icio.us

Philip Salom, best known for having authored nine collections of poetry, first tackled the novel genre in 2001 with Playback, a subtle mystery novel with which Toccata and Rain has a lot to share -- such as sex scenes galore, guilty secrets, and a narrative of poetic bent.

Toccata and Rain tells the story of a forty-eight-year-old eccentric, referred to as Simon, who has built two Freudian 'gaudy and metallic beauties' (p 8) towering over eight meters high in a Melbournian backyard. Becoming an object of curiosity at the heart of a controversy, media coverage of these arty monstrosities results in a late-night call from Simon's Perth-based wife Margaret who addresses him as Brian. Thanks to medical aid, Simon/ Brian fills in the gaps of his life through analeptic accounts surfacing during psychoanalytic sessions and hypnotic trances.

Dedicated to an architecture enthusiast -- Jacob Bronowski -- and to 'eccentric builders such as Simon Rodia', Salom's latest novel is the result of painstaking research (ricercare, in Italian) in neurology and psychoanalysis for a prize-winning MA thesis. By lending a sympathetic ear to the narrative, the readers will now and then detect theories by Freud, Lacan, Charcot, or Fritz Perls, for instance. Salom's twin interest in ontology and the poetic are united in this fascinating construct. Saying Salom, a lecturer in creative writing, is a creator like his central character would somehow be stating the obvious. Ultimately, he should be regarded as a composer. As novelist-cum-poet-cum-musician, Philip Salom shows all the versatility of a well-rounded artist.

Any classical music fan would recognise in the title, Toccata and Rain, an allusion to Alexander Boskovich's first movement of Concerto Da Camera entitled 'Toccata' which subdivides into five parts alternating three toccatas (First Rain -- Winter Rain -- Late Spring Rain) with two ricercares. Boskovich's piece was itself inspired from 16th century Italian organ composer Claudio Merulo (1533-1604), a pioneer of the toccata who particularly favoured the ricercare form. With Bach-like virtuosity, Salom uses the toccata -- the phallic eyesore in the story -- as a prelude to a minutely structured opus. As you would have thought, the novel takes after the 'fugue' as both central theme (in the psychological sense of the word) and overarching structure (music-wise). As in all fugues, the well-matched subject (memory) and countersubject (identity) echo each other while developing at different paces: memory issues often surge in the narrative flow whereas thoughts on identity are more occasional, remaining closely related to the subject of the fugue. As the almost unreliable narrator Simon puts it:

So much anxiety now about memory and its loss, the aged who live on broken air, the past-tense nightmare zone of Alzheimer's. Aphasia. What is the self, after all, when the contents, as the psychiatrists say, of the memory, or the stories of your self ... are lost? (p 72).

It is not the story he needs to replace but poetry. The mind [...] is poetry and prose. Prose is the episodic 'and then' of narrative. It is physical and literal and makes sense of the daily world, the body and work. What you did, what you said. Past tense. Poetry is the apprehension, the intuition, the emotional sense of value and strangeness. Poetry is finding feeling and even the unsayable. These meanings. He needs the poetry to be whole again (p 258).

Memory is many-layered. Some of it is kept in images. A lot of it is semantic or unseen knowledge, like how to remember the capital of Chile. We define ourselves a lot through episodes from our life -- hence 'episodic memory', as we call it. Like a big book. We're just very slow, tedious books. Except the stories change the more we tell them. Some are dramas, others are factual and some are trivial. Most are trivial. (p 162).

We take personality for granted. That we are 'one person' all the time. Yet we behave very differently even with our different friends and contacts. We are motivated in ways we are not conscious of. Some theorists say the 'I' is just a construct. (p 138).

Citation

• Jean-François Vernay. 'Review: Toccata and Rain by Philip Salom' [online]. Network Review of Books (Perth, Australian Public Intellectual Network), September 2004. Availability: <please cite the web address here> ISSN 1833-0932. [accessed 10 September 2010].

Back Cover Blurb

• Compelling and erotically charged, Toccata and Rain is a fast-moving psychological mystery about a man with a forgotten past.
  
  Simon creates an unintentional controversy when he constructs two large sculptural spires in his backyard in suburban Melbourne. A television interview results in a late-night phone call from his wife in Perth - of whom he has no recollection.
  
  Suddenly Simon is plunged into a psychological maelstrom. At its centre is a childhood trauma so horrific in its consequences, that he has been trying to escape it all his life. Through hypnosis and a sudden trip to Perth, Simon gradually uncovers the truth.
  
  A powerful narrative about memory and desire, Toccata and Rain peels back the layers, ambiguities and complexities of one man's life. The result is a virtuoso performance, a novel of great depth and power that holds the reader's attention at every turn.

Have You Also Read?

• Jazz Tango
  
  Tracy Ryan, Fremantle: FACP, 2002, 279 Pages, Paperback, $22.95
  Reviewed by Debra Zott in the December 2002 issue.
  
  Jazz Tango is an enticing title that seems to promise all the excitement and vigour of dance. Jas (the sound-alike name of the novel's main character) is an Australian expatriate living a thoroughly boring life in London. Having left Australia with an idealistic vision of glamorous employment opportunities, Jas finds herself working long hours for low pay in a city bookstore; and seeming to follow in the footsteps of her mother. Jas meets Todd, a wealthy, unromantic, intellectual, who asks her to marry him. She does so, adopting the manner of Jane Eyre -- 'Reader I married him' (p 58); perhaps hoping to embark on a new and materially satisfying life. Although she appears, rather, to drift ... read more.