The Literary Lunch: Selected Stories, by Geoffrey Dean
Launched at Hobart Bookshop, 18 November 2004 by Lindsay Tuffin,
Tasmanian journalist of the year 2004 and editor of The
Tasmanian Times.
Launched at Fullers
Bookshop,
93 St John St Launceston
3 December 2004.
* * * * *
'Masked' literary desperado revealed as 'genuine human
being'!!
IT is always a good idea to start at the beginning, so, being a perverse character,
I shall begin by quoting from the very last sentence in Geoff’s book.
“And don’t forget the voices.”
It is the voices that are important in this collection, the voices of the
various characters, voices that come across as just right, whether it is the
kids in ‘The Candidate’, real estate salesman Ollie Stomp in ‘Seller
of Dreams’ or the prisoners in ‘A Glimpse of Freedom’. I
have always thought that the most important organ for a writer is the ear,
and Geoff has a fine ear for the way people speak. But what is also important
is the ability to set down what you hear in such a way that readers may hear
it too, and that is where the skill, the craft of writing comes into play.
It goes without saying that Geoff has plenty of skill in this aspect of his
art, otherwise we wouldn’t know from the stories that he had such a fine
ear. It is the voices as well as the actions of the characters that make them
live for us, that make it seem, in some cases, that we have known them for
a lot longer than it takes to read 3000 or 4000 words.
The next very brief quote I shall make is the description of the main character
in one of the stories:
“Clown/magician/juggler/desperado”
I think this phrase sums up the role of the writer, and Geoff’s use
of it in this particular story is nicely ironic, because the action takes place
at a literary barbecue, as grotesque a concept as one could come up with, although
perhaps the fact that the story is set in Adelaide explains this. The character,
who, significantly, is not named, seems at first to be something of an intruder,
a busking outsider who is bizarrely incongruous in such a culturally refined
setting. But he is, of course, the archetype of the real writer; he is, in
fact, a Geoff Dean: a clown who can make us laugh while the sadness is never
far below the surface; a magician who can conjure up not just characters and
plots but whole memories, whole communities, out of seemingly nothing; a juggler
who can keep the all the elements of a good story in the air at the same time;
and a desperado. Well, you’ve only got to look at him, really. But despite
the fact that ‘desperado’ translates literally from the Spanish
as ‘no-hoper’, it is the idea of the writer as outlaw, as perennial persona
non grata in polite society, that is contained in this little allegory
and that Geoff Dean, autodidact, battler, ex-lumberjack, and always, always
iconoclast, epitomises.
In his Author’s Note at the beginning of the book Geoff writes about ‘masks’.
I was immediately struck by this as I have recently been asked to write about ‘the
concept of speaking through a poetic mask, or masque, or borrowed voice,’ and
it is, as Geoff says, acknowledging a debt to Paul Theroux, the mask as something
which is in itself ‘neither true nor false but ... a means of discovering
something new’ and which is created by the author in order to present
this discovery to the world that is essential to the art of the short story.
We should be wary of taking the simplistic approach of identifying the author
with any of his characters. In a sense he is as much Ollie Stomp as the union
official in that wonderful story, ‘Summerbird’. He is the writer
as purveyor of parcels of paradise or as captive to the suffocating ministrations
of the desperately well-meaning lonely. But of course he is equally the first
person narrator of ‘Seller of Dreams’ and the desperate healing
hermit of ‘Summerbird’. Most definitely he is the macrocephalic
messenger of ‘Messages’, subversive graffitist and pruner of society’s
metaphorical rose bushes. He is all these characters and yet none of them.
As we read the stories in this collection we, too, become these characters.
He enables us to get inside the fascinating mind of ‘The Most Unemployable
Man in the Country’, of the teenagers in ‘The Town that Died’ and
of both ‘Billy the Kid’ and his childhood friend the vitamiser
man.
This is a collection of very well crafted stories, of masks that do not hide
the truth but reveal it in much more useful manifestations than could ever
be discernible without them. It is, above all, a collection which displays,
for all the craft that has gone into its creation, a warmth and a compassion
for humanity which can never be faked, which shine through simply as spontaneous
emanations from someone who is a genuine talent but, more importantly, a genuine
human being.
I congratulate Geoff on the publication of this volume. I congratulate Giles
and Anne and thank them for making these stories available in such a handsome
edition, and I have the greatest of pleasure in launching and insisting that
you all buy a copy.
Tim Thorne
|
