Clueless in Mangoland

Ross Fitzgerald & Trevor Jordan, Fools’ Paradise: Life in an Altered State (Arcadia, 2011), 238 pages, $24.95

The Australian humorous novel, once handsomely represented by the works of Lenny Lower and Barry Oakley, is an endangered species. While it has become de rigueur for television and radio comedians to pop out a light holiday read just in time for the Christmas sales, books that satirise Australian life on a wider or deeper scale are rare. One possible explanation is that, when you reach the point where Greens hold the balance of power and university lecturers have to calculate the carbon footprint of their courses, a literary form that relies principally on exaggeration can no longer compete with reality. One of the few authors still practising this increasingly quaint art is Ross Fitzgerald in his “Grafton Everest” series of novels. The latest, Fools’ Paradise, co-written with Trevor Jordan, continues the satirical narrative of Grafton’s adventures that began with Pushed from the Wings in 1989.

For those unacquainted with Professor Everest, he is the indolent, opportunistic and promiscuous Professor of LifeSkills and Hospitality at the University of Mangoland—a barely fictitious northern Australian state where academic life is indissolubly intertwined with politics at both campus and government levels.

The lumbering, chocolate-addicted, wife-dominated, technophobic, hypochondriac Grafton, whose only declared ambition is to have no ambition, is a sort of academic Rumpole of the Bailey but without the skills. As Grafton himself observes, a “career” is an out-of-control journey downhill, which is an accurate description of his own rake’s progress. While the university faces inquiries pending privatisation and possible refurbishment as a centre of Creation Science, Grafton delivers a breakfast television political commentary from the comfort of his bed, ducks faculty meetings, assists his mistress with staging a nude production of Paradise Lost and delivers late-night homilies on a redneck radio station. Able to resist anything but temptation, Grafton is both a media and a sexual tart who finally gets in too deep when he agrees to ghost-write the biography of former right-wing Premier Otis Von Hoogstraden while at the same time standing as a candidate for the Workers Party.

In case it is not already obvious, these novels are not the Australian version of Oxbridge Blues: they are a Barry McKenzian view of Australian academic and political life populated by cartoonish, in some cases grotesque, caricatures. Apart from guessing which real-life people might be the bases for characters, the book’s main pleasures lie in the small gems of politically incorrect writing that stud the work. The towering, LOAF (lesbian over the age of forty) vice-chancellor of the university is described as having an Adam’s apple that jutted like “a swallowed testicle”. Her LUG (lesbian until graduation) lover appears wearing a “wonder-bra which pushed her breasts together so spectacularly that they seemed to be attempting to get up her nose”. When Grafton complains of not feeling very well, his unsympathetic wife reminds him that “the pyramids were built by people who didn’t feel very well”.

Such caricatures bring problems, however. Because the female characters seem to fall consistently into the categories of Motherly Carer, Deranged Political Radical or Easy Sex Partner, and the fact that much of the humour is based on the players being height-challenged, Asian, indigenous or gay, it is easy to dismiss Fitzgerald and Jordan’s satire as springing from assumptions of Anglo-white-male normality. But this would be a superficial assessment.

First, Grafton is not in any way granted privileged status as a middle-aged white male. On the contrary, he is perhaps the most explicitly flawed character of all. Second, the reactions of a 1940s-born Australian male with ingrained allegiances to Australian rules and Menzian values, confronting a multicultural, equal-opportunity, postmodern, soccer-mad world is precisely what these books are about. Grafton’s very predicament is to be an ageing Aussie bloke confronted by social, political and intellectual changes which he does not understand and over which, most importantly, he has no control. His response to this powerlessness is to sink into a kind of resigned bewilderment. Yet, as his old teacher and mentor Lee Horton explains to him, 

you are an optimist of sorts. For you, history is a thing of the past, the present is uncomfortable and the future is bleak; but somewhere two minutes away, or as long as it takes you to get to the snack machine, you are always full of expectation. You are a “two minute” optimist. Somehow I think that in this millennium there will be a lot more like you.  

Grafton replies: “Well, you know what I say. One century at a time.”

If there is a disappointment with Fools’ Paradise it is that, though it sets itself in the twenty-first century, it presents a view of Queensland—sorry, Mangoland—more reminiscent of the eighties and nineties. The undiminished power of the Boerish former premier, the confluence of charismatic Christianity and capitalism, a sheepish Opposition leader and a capital city called Waynesville (it is not clear whether that’s from Goss or Swan) are all good cartoonish stuff but in a world of collapsing economies, minority governments and carbon trading, they seem leftovers from a time when Queensland—sorry, Mangoland, I keep doing that—was seen by the southern states as a kind of Wild West tourist boom town. My hope is, without giving away the ending of Fools’ Paradise, that the next book in the series sees Grafton move into the federal arena where the real jokes are waiting to be told.