Night Blue by Angela O’Keeffe

Transit Lounge, $27.99 pb, 144 pp

Of these three works, the central premise of Angela O’Keeffe’s first novel, Night Blue, sounds most bonkers. The story’s first half is told from the point of view of Blue Poles, a 1952 painting by the Abstract Expressionist Jackson Pollock. The novel begins at Blue Poles’s birth, the cigarette-puffing Pollock peering at our inanimate hero with ‘a gaze that sought me as one seeks a horizon’. The painting is later shipped off to Canberra, a controversial $1.3 million purchase by the then-unbuilt Australian National Gallery. Thus, we are privy to a close-up of Gough Whitlam and ‘his lustrous hair’, as well as the sea of everyday Australians who come to express their disgust at the painting’s cost: ‘they’d come not to discover what they thought of me but to prove what they’d already decided’.

This front-row tour of historical figures and events is fun, but Blue Poles is itself a rather dull tour guide, ‘a witness rather than an active participant’ in the narrative. Once affixed to the wall of the gallery, it subsists on the mental debris of passers-by: ‘thought floated and sometimes became snagged in me’. At times, Pollock’s memories also bubble to the surface, ranging from ‘the shadow of an ash tree from his Arizona childhood’ to Pollock’s abuse of his wife, the painter Lee Krasner. But these flashes are not enough to flesh out either Pollock or his creation. Unlike the garrulous fossils of Chris Flynn’s Mammoth (2020), the paintings do not interact with one another when night falls, so there is no way to know how Blue Poles’s airy voice distinguishes it from, say, The Death of Constable Scanlon.

The momentum returns in the novel’s more conventional second half, which is narrated by Alyssa, an Australian writer pondering the timely question of whether art can ever be, or ever should be, separated from artist. Adrift in New York after a research trip mishap, Alyssa feverishly mixes her abhorrence for Pollock with misgivings about a stale marriage and ‘the child that never was’. As with Abstract Expressionism, feeling usurps meaning in the story’s resolution. In a final image, Pollock is shown studying a ‘stone that words could not reach’; perhaps the same is true for Blue Poles.

Where the Line Breaks by Michael Burrows

Fremantle Press, $29.99 pb, 218 pp

Michael Burrows’s début, Where the Line Breaks, also features dual narrators, although both are human this time. The first is Alan Lewis, a young Australian soldier who leaves Perth and his new fiancée to become caught up in the gears of World War I. The second is Matthew Denton, also from Perth, but living in London a century later while he writes his PhD thesis on the Unknown Digger, an anonymous soldier–poet who, Matthew argues, is none other than deceased war hero Alan Lewis. Matthew’s half of the story is told entirely through the chapters of his dissertation. Scholarly analysis of Alan’s life and, potential, art appears in the main body of the text, while descriptions of Matthew’s personal unravelling worm their way into the footnotes.

Each strand of the novel succeeds in its own way. The war sections eschew History Channel exposition dumps in favour of transporting details, such as the Gallipoli wind screaming through a bullet wound, ‘playing Collopy’s body like an instrument’. The dissertation’s intricate weaving of real and fabricated sources recalls Ryan O’Neill’s superb Their Brilliant Careers (2016). I had to ask Google for a reality check on more than one occasion (Ginger Mick: somehow real!). The unexpected ribaldry of the footnotes seems to burst this illusion at first, with dry book citations bizarrely giving way to Matthew’s reminiscences of a backpacker ‘jerking me off in the hostel bedroom’. But as the cause of this deranged oversharing gradually becomes apparent, these asides coalesce into a satire set ‘in the dangerous unknown of the academic world’.

There is no doubt, however, that Alan’s struggles eclipse Matthew’s. While the former cradles a dying friend, the latter whinges about putting up wallpaper: ‘my own personal Lone Pine’. The back and forth between them should be a tonal mess, but it works because both characters are, regardless of the gravity of their situations, just people: fallible, hypocritical, self-serving. While Burrows keeps mum on the true identity of the Unknown Digger until the last, the book’s central joke is that Matthew assumes only perfect heroes, ‘whose actions are astonishing enough to accommodate the artistic genius within’, can write poetry in the first place. If that were true, humanity wouldn’t have a single verse to its name.

The Speechwriter by Martin McKenzie-Murray

Scribe, $29.99 pb, 240 pp

In the time it takes others to deliver their elevator pitch, Martin McKenzie-Murray’s first novel, The Speechwriter, has already told a hundred jokes. This rapid-fire political satire recalls Paul Beatty and Armando Iannucci, even if it doesn’t quite fillet its targets with the same precision as those two modern masters. The story is told via the memoirs of Toby Beaverbrook, tracing his rise from Winston Churchill-obsessed child prodigy to speechwriter for the prime minister. When his dreams of being ‘a balladeer for our national project’ are curdled by repeated instructions to ‘assemble some pap on ingenuity’, Toby embarks on a wild pre-election experiment that results in bizarre rants about sharks and water polo.

McKenzie-Murray, a former speechwriter himself, aptly apes the gibberish of political jargon: ‘we’ve reviewed the consensus and will entwine some unorthodoxy’. But the satire here has long been lapped by reality. Sure, the PM’s description of sharks as ‘terrorists … with gills’ is strange, but have you heard the one about injecting bleach? Furthermore, considering that Donald Trump is on his third term in this alternate reality, why would Toby be surprised that unhinged rhetoric leads to poll bumps: ‘people saw PolSpeak as a virus, and insanity looked like its cure’. Toby may despise his boss’s former ‘dull and wonkish dependability’, but in 2021 that sounds like a cold soda in hell.

There is plenty else here, however, that McKenzie-Murray nails to the wall. Sky News: ‘thoughts that would have otherwise been scrawled in faeces upon white walls were now beamed to airport lounges across the nation’. The Canberra boys-club: ‘If I snap a bra, that’s me telling you I love your work.’ Modern art: ‘canvas soaked in blood and Japanese mayonnaise’. Some of the best humour is also the silliest, such as a digression on Dr. Seuss’s ill-fated career as a crime reporter. But even with all the sentient PlayStations, cow fellatio scandals, and Don Bradman porn parodies, there’s a sense that The Speechwriter is playing catch-up to the actual weirdness of the present moment. Aren’t we all?