The new area of interest in Foster’s latest novel, Mates of Mars, is the martial arts. The Mates are: Steve Overton, ex-policeman, former bouncer and black belt in Taekwondo though now confined to a wheelchair; Cyril Jiberan, NSW Leagues player, also a TKO instructor and an Aboriginal from the Top End; Bruce Nonnemacher, professor in Sydney’s College of Knowledge, who is working his way through midlife crisis, in urgent quest for a black belt; Dr Cheng Siong Fai, otherwise Vincent and the Monkey Prince, a Straits Chinese and monkey vivisectionist at the College; Jade Muldoon or Big Red who gives classes in self-defence for girls; and Sven Scrimshaw, sometime male model and co-rapist, martial arts film actor, TKO black belt, who is in love with Jade and keen to extract vengeance from Nonnemacher, who failed him at the College.

Connecting links of love, affection, sex, and revenge are established between these characters during the first half of the novel. Midway through the narrative, the six Mates decide to go on a training camp together at Neverfuckinlose, Cyril’s home in the Top End, the narrative tense shifts from the past into the present and the book moves to a conclusion in which four of them survive even if they are finally, as the title of the last section puts it, ‘Over the Hill’. There is a good deal of action, frequent violence, bawdiness, obscenity, together with episodes of an entirely different kind, such as one set in Sydney in the 1960s (previously included in Helen Daniel’s Expressway, under the title ‘Death Touch’.

A cryptic introductory note to Mates of Mars refers us to the American historian Arnold Toynbee, the medieval Chanson de Roland and the ‘Sinic Mahayana Buddhist Civilisation in its Westernised Japanese/Korean/Colonial Chinese branch’. To paraphrase: Australia is on the periphery of the burgeoning Asian ‘civilisation’ (Toynbee saw history in terms of civilisation rather than nation-state) and, as Charlemagne’s warriors, ‘the Frankish Mates of Mars’, evolved their heroic belief in mateship and struggle on the northwest edge of the Islamic empire, so Foster’s Mates of Mars may do something similar in their situation to Asia’s south. Toynbee was interested in fringe dwellers and in the growth and decay of civilisations: and Foster’s introductory note sets up a framework of ironic correspondences which his novel goes on to explore. The results include a string include a string of contentious references to Japanese racism, their exploitation of ocean fisheries, financial aid to Aboriginal settlements and, in particular, the disastrously muzzy attitudes shown by Australia’s politicians to all of these.

The satirical tone changes when the novel comments directly on the question of masculine identity. Mates of Mars argues that aggression and violence are a basic and inevitable part of being male. The narrative commentator, speaking directly to the reader, says that, no matter how we may deny it, we must accept that the basic response of every pair of men meeting for the first time is: ‘Could I cop this guy in a blue?’ Because the precepts and practices of the martial arts do accept this, the novel suggests they provide the means to move beyond it. They represent a type of masculine liberation. Taekwondo, literally the Way, or ‘Do’, of Kicking and Punching, promotes the spiritual values of Indomitable Spirit, Courtesy, Integrity, Self-Control and Perseverance.

TKO is a ‘hard’ martial arts style, Tai Chi is a ‘soft’ one, and it is the tension between the hard and the soft that defines masculinity. As one of the many martial arts precepts included in the text puts it: ‘Hard before soft, Warrior’s Way. Only those who have proven their toughness earn the right to softness, and for them it is less a right than a longing to experience all of Experience.’ You have to accept masculine identity in all its aspects, and this includes the darker ones, to achieve psychic integration.

Foster’s novel is briskly paced, diverse in form and full of interesting information about what goes on in sweaty dojangs over the Parramatta Road and off Singapore’s Orchard Road, about prawn-fishing in the Gulf (one of my favourite sections of the novel), about the changing way of life in rubber-tapping communities in Malaysia, about Aboriginal rites and the spread of AIDS. It is preceptive, fistic, abrasive and it will make you laugh on the other side of your face because that is what it is designed to do. I do not agree that men’s first instincts on meeting each other are about who would win in a fight and I feel that martial arts precepts written into the text (as with the Warrior’s Way reference above) are treated with a sanctity out of keep­ing with the rest of the book.

But then, this is a novel of surprises. On the first page, we are shown Steve Overton, muscle man, ex-bouncer and martial artist, servicing his newly bought wheelchair. He is vulnerable, paralysed and (he subsequently cuts his legs off because he thinks he can do better without them) an image of the self-mutilating male. This is a different side of the warrior mentality to the one that predominates in the novel but, as he says later, ‘How a man copes with injury is more important than natural talent. It’s the whole secret of life, really.’ This is an aggressive, uncompromising book, but it has a dynamism and also a compassion that insist we take it seriously.