In short, Robert Dessaix is some kind of national treasure because he represents with a kind of Helpmann-like elegance and virtuosity the side of our sensibilities we publicly repress: he’s spidery, he’s sinister and he knows that unfashionable thing: that if the word is not with God then it’s likely to be nowhere. He’s also the kind of person who finds the organised Australian world of politics and sport appalling. And this country, with its all-consuming conformism, needs such naysayers the way it needs oxygen and light. Robert Dessaix comes across as a kind of walking work of art, so perhaps it’s not surprising that he’s attempted to produce one. Corfu is his first novel, written without prevarication or discursive mediation and shadow-play. It incorporates apparent non-fictional elements, but the logic of the book is to follow the free play of the fictive rather than the grid of some actual (i.e. some factual) experience or its analytical simulacra.

All of which sounds well and good, indeed it sounds exciting. The trouble is that Corfu is not an exciting novel at all, nor, alas, a good one. It’s true that it exhibits all the sumptuousness and skill of Dessaix’s prose style, all his capacity to listen to what blows on the wind of a culture, historically apprehended, but it does these things maddeningly, to no end term, as a form of burbling preciousness that has a consistent off-putting effect like the odour of rotting violets. Robert Dessaix has always had things in common with the Patrick Leigh Fermors of this world who can trace the frescos and cooking smells of the intimately exotic like tapestries or calligraphy, but in Corfu he becomes positively traveloguing and self-involved.

There’s a gorgeousness in the writing, but it’s like someone swathing themselves in silk or satin without getting the dress to fit. What seems wise and superabundant in the essayistic moves towards fiction becomes here (where the novelistic intention is at once feeble and overt) like so much wrapping paper encircling far too little, a stage paste or bit of glass that has been mistaken for a diamond.

Corfu is the story (if that’s the word) of an Australian actor, generally out of work in London or wherever, who finds himself on the island of Corfu, staying in the house of one Kester Berwick who in the long-ago past — the time now is 1987 — did avant-garde things on obscure English stages (Noh and other illuminations) which caught the attention of Dame Sybil Thorndike among others. Berwick — an historical figure — also felt the allure of young men and, in his home town, Adelaide, engaged in a range of theatrical experiments with such memorable real-life figures as John Tasker. He is also the enthralling background spectre of the book, because Kester was himself both a seeker on the spiritual path and a figure who seems to have had the capacity to tempt people into abysses of unknowing from which illumination might come.

He exercises a strange fascination over the narrator who finds himself in thrall to the after-trace of his image. He is also a kind of guru figure to William, the young Australian set designer with whom the narrator is in love or at any rate for whom he nurses some erotic or amatory interest.

Readers of Corfu (and they will, in the first instance, be many) should be grateful to William because, in his blue-eyed, light-brown-haired fashion, he speaks, in his laconic boyish way, in conversational English. He is the only character in the book (apart from the narrator whom he provokes dialectically) who ever does.

Nine-tenths of the dialogue in Corfu consists of faintly preposterous la-di-dahisms about Maltese Knights and Turkish campaigns and the Austrian Empress Sisi. It’s bad enough that the narrative voice is full of this kind of recapitulative, historically ‘resonant’ wallpapering, but it does beggar belief a little when the rest of the characters start palavering on (for several hundred words a mouthful) like Edwardian Baedekers. So William, at least, is an occasion of dialogical grace. On the other hand, he is the person from whom the narrator has vamoosed — in a moment of Dessaixian solipsistic impulse — when they are together in Rome, despite the hero’s strong inclination towards him. This is the kind of plot improbability that can’t possibly work in a book of this kind where the narrative tempo is so doodling and diurnal. It could work in a thriller where the attention was riveted by speed and freakishness, but the only freak show in this limp little book is the author’s inability, time after time, to get anything like an illusion of life.

Corfu is one of those books — they’re not crimes against humanity, but they don’t make life easier to bear — in which female American professors of classics drive Australian actors many miles before they realise they are not experts on the construction of Sappho’s text, or where characters flit in and out of the narrative on authorial whim without having anything to say or without being equipped, poor things, with human voices that simulate even the noises and trace elements of personality.

Corfu is a book of such besetting faiblesse that it comes, almost as a relief, at any rate as a diminished misfortune, that the book is full to the brim, if not flowing over, with the detritus of the author’s Ideas about Literature.

Robert Dessaix has used his own experience as a Russianist and as a translator of Chekhov (for the Melbourne Theatre Company) to take a bath first of all in The Cherry Orchard (the narrator plays Trofimov and William is the designer); and then in Uncle Vanya, which is staged in the Great House on the island. This allows for a good deal of talk about the comedic slant of Chekhov’s sense of human trustfulness and the now-you-see-it/now-you-don’t aspect of his sense of hope, almost religiously lit. As criticism, this stuff is not terrific and, although it’s the very ground on which Dessaix might shine and shine, his shuffling narrative context doesn’t give him enough room to flesh out the different ways in which it’s possible to feel about a great writer. And, as with Chekhov, so it is Sappho and Cavafy, who punctuate this rather footling collection of amassed eloquencies like a piercing — and parodic — intimation of reality.

Oh, there’s Homer too, in Fagles’s translation and in paraphrase, providing a kind of resplendent upholstery for Robert Dessaix’s musing sense of how the geography of the mind inheres in a haunted locality.

It’s difficult not to see Corfu as some kind of mistake. It has a good deal of opulent writing which might be functionally gorgeous if it had its place in, say, a high-class detective story but here is lacking context. The prose is nothing if not dappled and deft, but at the end of the day it is not imaginative enough, like Nabokov’s, say, or Proust’s, to stand on its own (not that either of those gentlemen would have allowed theirs to for a moment).

It functions here as a kind of signifier of a sensibility which can’t quite bestir itself to get stuck into a significant story. That may not be the end of the world, but it has the effect of making Dessaix’s style look decorative rather than integral. What can look poetic in the faction here looks like a rhetorical gloss, because the language has become all but purely gestural. Of course there’s a lot of glister in the apparent gold, and no doubt some readers will find plenty to admire in the grace notes that adorn this circumlocutory dance round an aesthetic destination. What no one is likely to do is read on for the narrative momentum.

The subject matter can certainly be construed as objectively interesting, and the Kester Berwick evoked here is one of those stuffed owls from the archaeology of an Australian past that connects with a collective one which has the capacity to captivate imaginations very different from Robert Dessaix’s.

I think it’s a pity that that imagination is not in very high-powered form in this first novel. It’s as if he can’t allow himself the licence to do the thing that might have seemed implicit in his earlier work. It hardly matters. The best of that work is luminous, lightning struck.