The Novel as Artwork: Christopher Koch’s Lost Voices

In 2003, Noel Henricksen introduced Island and Otherland, his literary biography of Christopher Koch, with the declaration that “Koch is a storyteller”.[1] Henricksen’s book also reveals a lesser-known side of Koch as sketcher and watercolourist.[2] Such art is the true vocation of Hugh Dixon, protagonist of Koch’s latest novel, Lost Voices.[3] Yet Hugh is not the sole subject, for the novel tells the stories of two others, Martin Dixon, Hugh’s colonial ancestor, and Walter Dixon, Hugh’s great-uncle, a surviving link between Hugh and Martin. Lost Voices encompasses three major elements: the tale of the growth and development of a talented artist, an inventive nineteenth-century historical scenario, and a tense courtroom drama.

Technically, this new work is best described as a work of storytelling art, constructed as a triptych, in which the two side wings focus attention upon the centrepiece. It is the novelist’s task to carve out fictional spaces and to explore their possibilities. In 1987, Koch termed invention “the supreme creative task” of novel writing.[4] Lost Voices offers a compelling bushranger yarn, alone worth the cover price for its imaginative depiction of a doomed utopia. The wings of Koch’s triptych are designed and rendered very effectively as framework for this central panel.

Though “art” is a major preoccupation in this novel, the idea of the novel as artwork is not new for Koch, as evidenced by his two previous novels, Highways to a War (1995) and Out of Ireland (1999), which were intended to be viewed as a diptych, with each one illuminating matters dealt with in the other. Koch’s novels are being reissued by HarperCollins, and it will be excellent if this sturdy and attractive volume is an example of what is to come.

Lost Voices has on its front cover an artwork from Australian history, William Strutt’s Bushrangers, Victoria, Australia, 1852, which depicts three Antipodean highwaymen bailing up a most interesting assortment of terrified citizens. The painting operates in a similar manner to Koch’s novel, for Strutt composed it as an inverted triangle, focusing attention on the central figure of the armed bandit, yet allowing all the other figures their own roles. It is a wonderful painting, beautifully detailed, whose soft, almost pastel colouring belies the violence of its subject matter. The artwork is emblematic of what lies within the pages of Koch’s novel, where serious, even appalling subject matter is leavened by the careful craft of an expert. Adroit combination of the novelist’s art and craft will make Koch’s oeuvre endure when lesser contemporary work is consigned to oblivion.

One panel of Koch’s triptych forms the first part of the novel. It might easily be termed “the portrait of the artist as a young man”. Set in the 1940s and 1950s, it describes the life of schoolboy and budding artist Hugh Dixon, descendant of a wealthy settler family that arrived in Van Diemen’s Land in the latter convict days. Hugh’s schooldays are conventional, for modern Tasmania has buried the troublesome past: middle-class life proceeds almost unperturbed by the toxins. However, in the Dixon family lurks a streak of recklessness and it is also clear that vice, poverty and violence co-exist with cosy suburbia: interwoven with Hugh’s story is that of his schoolmate Bob Wall, an abused child who has artistic talent to match Hugh’s. Together, Hugh and Bob discover the varied and magical art of the comic book, something of a recurring and not entirely nostalgic trope in Koch’s work. The comic book, however, is not an entirely innocent form of entertainment.

Here, in its subtle treatment of the masked eroticism of comic material and its links to pornography, a major theme of the novel is broached. Using the triptych form, Koch develops this theme to its fullest possible extent in the context of this novel. Only a writer of the highest order could blend together two such ostensibly unrelated ingredients: bushranging and pornography. Their common denominator is crime. Cogitation is invited upon whether or not modern society has been “ambushed” by pornography, for Koch searches some of the byways of social complicity in its production and distribution. The novel quietly points out that bushranging was also assisted to a certain degree by social complicity.

Koch’s young artist Hugh Dixon, decent, kindly and sensitive, is nevertheless disengaged in at least one important way, for he is alienated from his family history. Lost voices indeed, and sometimes to one’s peril. Deep hazards exist in ignorance of history, a trope powerfully present in Koch’s mature work. This is a pertinent idea for all Australians in terms of what is taught (or not taught) in schools, for as the adage goes, those who do not know history are destined to repeat it. When circumstances suddenly dictate a family reunion, Hugh is forced to confront history of several kinds by his great-uncle Walter, a Hobart lawyer. Walter Dixon is reclusive and still hears voices lost by others, for he is obsessed with the past. He is of scholarly bent and owns a splendid library, housing numerous art books. Walter is a frustrated artist and, seeing the raw talent in Hugh, quickly becomes both mentor and patron.

Walter is a complex character with a ruling passion for art, particularly that of the Renaissance. He lives alone in the Dixon ancestral home and employs a housekeeper-secretary, Moira Doran. Koch juxtaposes this character, a Catholic widow, with items from Renaissance art’s vast treasure house: a Crivelli Magdalene (of which Crivelli produced several) and Botticelli’s Birth of Venus, of the 1480s. The attention Koch gives to subsidiary characters sets his writing apart, and it is a mistake to ignore names in his fiction: Moira Doran’s name translates to “gift of the fates”, and the meaning of this develops as the narrative progresses.

Koch makes an intriguing choice of Western canonical artworks: The Birth of Venus is fraught with significance. Walter Dixon refers to her as “Aphrodite”, suggesting what Koch himself has termed in another context “the latent power and ecstasy of the archetypal feminine”, that which is designed to stir “the dormant male principle from its quiet”.[5] Koch notes that in Western culture “the Goddess herself, [is] transformed as Mary … the Mother of Mercy and intercessor for the human race”.[6] It is widely believed that Botticelli used the same model for his many studies of the Virgin Mary as he did for his Venus, although as Cristina Acidini and others have asserted, it is difficult to prove beyond doubt the exact identity of Botticelli’s muse/model.[7] It is more certain that Botticelli’s Venus is perhaps the most familiar full-scale nude in Western art. Naked female divinities cast lengthy and ominous shadows in much of Koch’s fiction, and their frail human counterparts can meet unpleasant endings. But, as shown by her juxtaposition with Mary Magdalene, Moira Doran is different. Mary Magdalene is the archetypal penitent female. God rewards repentance: according to St John’s Gospel, Mary Magdalene was first to see Christ after the Resurrection. As well as an alluring sexual aura, Moira Doran is given a personal iconography of love, endurance and hope.

Both artwork and woman have ambiguous beauty. This discovery is a significant moment for Hugh as an awakening artist. But Walter, the older man, demands an even more nuanced response. He speaks as one ambushed by beauty: while immersed in the Florentine version of classical antiquity, he became “dizzy with joy”.[8] It seems that Walter, as a youth, experienced something akin to Stendhal’s Syndrome in the Uffizi Gallery. Named after the French writer (who experienced it in Italy) Stendhal’s Syndrome is an ecstatic cerebral delirium that visits certain sensitive persons when they find themselves surrounded by magnificent artwork.[9] Botticelli’s Primavera triggered such a response in Walter. Hugh’s initial response to Botticelli’s Venus is not so exclusively cerebral, so Walter emphasises the cultural and intellectual heft of the Renaissance, in which medieval religious faith and humanism began, as it were, to negotiate. Walter exhorts Hugh to partake of the “excitement of the mind” experienced by the genius artists of Medici Florence.[10] As well as being properly responsive to beauty, artists must be responsible for what they present to the public. Instructing Hugh to enlarge his horizons, Walter is, in the politest possible manner, ordering him to grow up.

Walter is an aesthete in the mould of Pater, whose essays he quotes. He is concerned primarily with the artist’s traditional vocation of the pursuit of absolute beauty: a dense philosophical question that might be argued indefinitely. Suffice it to note that Walter’s own absolutism seems justified by the sad fact that a great deal of modern art, for all sorts of reasons, is decidedly un-beautiful. But there is rather more to it: delicate but vigorous, this passage expands Koch’s thematic concern with veiled eroticism in art, building into it the notion of the dichotomy between art and pornography. Art elevates the human mind and spirit but pornography is an evil that degrades all humankind.

Walter Dixon connects the first panel to the central panel, thereby linking the lives of the descendants to their ancestors. He harbours the hidden past of Hugh’s family in a unique way, for he comes from the last generation to experience bushrangers as real people. The value of the triptych form in this context is to enable the past, the present and the future to converse without converging. Entering the nineteenth century through Walter Dixon’s memory and utilising Martin Dixon’s point of view, the centrepiece of Koch’s triptych explores the enigmatic personality of the notorious soldier-bandit Lucas Wilson, as it maps the destinies of Liam Dalton and Roy Griffin, escapees from England’s ironclad penal system as manifested at Port Arthur. Here, it is as though Koch has returned to the cold, dense Tasmanian forests that he depicted in The Doubleman (1985) and in Out of Ireland, parting the leaves to discover and to focus upon the hidden figures of escaped convicts. Imaginative retrieval of characters otherwise lost to history is art of a very high order.

Traditionally, real art is always far more than a mere arrangement of colour and form: it has moral lessons to teach. One strong and obvious moral is that a coercive utopian is an extremely unsafe thing to be. And yet, coercive utopians attract disciples, who themselves can be multifaceted. If any character can be described as “heroic”, it is Wilson’s pragmatic supporter Liam Dalton, a man of action who refuses victimhood. Dalton also has romantic and contemplative sides: a three-dimensional character almost as interesting as Wilson. Their shared story is an object lesson that in the teeth of hard-won Western civilisation, new societies founded on theft and violence are inherently unstable, therefore short-lived. Such societies naturally attract evil. This is personified by the demonic Roy Griffin, former legal clerk turned convict, who inveigles his way into secluded “Nowhere Valley”, site of the bandits’ hidden community, where the outlaw Lucas Wilson rules by the law of the gun. Personalities of Wilson’s type have demagogue charisma, persisting well beyond the grave. Perhaps Ned Kelly is a prime example. Although documents such as Kelly’s so-called “Jerilderie Letter” tend to reveal him as a conventionally truculent Irish-descended hothead, Kelly myth-making persists in Australian art, literature and film. Walter Dixon’s obsession with Lucas Wilson demonstrates that Wilson exercises a similarly intense attraction.

Lost Voices concerns itself, as well, with the arousal of various types of lust. Its paramount setting, in the period before the advent of the permissive society, and the use of narrative flashback facilitate the examination of the concept behind this unfashionable word. Though far from unlovely, Wilson is a fanatic, which makes him susceptible to a lust for power. In Koch’s previous novel The Memory Room (2007), Gnosticism reared its head. In Lost Voices, he confronts it again directly in the character of Roy Griffin, who attempts to seduce both Lucas Wilson and Martin Dixon with a mysterious and Faustian-sounding bargain. Griffin is a profoundly evil man, a rapist with detailed and alarming knowledge of the occult.

In previous centuries, occultism was considered esoteric and dangerous, therefore was shunned. This is no longer the case. As Michael D. O’Brien noted as long ago as 1994, it is a disturbing fact that children are routinely exposed to the occult in their fantasy literature: traditional artistic licence has become licentiousness in terms of what is on offer.[11] Twenty-first-century Western society is thoroughly desensitised to the occult, and Gnosticism in various guises is so common as to escape notice. Koch handles the confrontation with conviction and places it at the heart of the novel. Permanent consequences apply for a close encounter with the diabolic and these reverberate through generations. Martin Dixon, Hugh’s ancestor, in his fateful quest for adventure outside the tedium of colonial society, chronicles the tale of Lucas Wilson’s doomed experiment, but is haunted as a result, infected with lifelong restlessness. The innocent also suffer, for Martin’s son Walter is also infected, even at second-hand.

Though not quite the heart of darkness described by Conrad, Koch’s gripping central narrative departs far from Hobart’s cosy suburbs and farms and compels the reader to the final moments, for it is entirely plausible. And while events, characters and plotlines vary markedly, the three elements of lust, violence and coercion that feature in the nineteenth-century story prefigure that which occurs in the twentieth century.

The triptych’s third panel is darker altogether than the first, which is permeated by the radiance of youthful innocence. In the first panel, delight is pierced by suffering only half-understood, for the tale is only half-told. In the final segment, Hugh is an adult: as his tale proceeds, adult suffering predominates, although pierced by joy. Patterns set in the past begin eerily to repeat themselves: evil sidles into Hugh’s life in the form of a talented fashion artist and cartoonist who has developed a marked penchant for pornographic portrayal of sexual violence and for the systematic abuse of women. It is no coincidence that evil continues to manifest itself in this way in the twentieth century, or that it precipitates a fearful episode in which the happiness of all is put at risk. This episode culminates in a meticulously etched courtroom drama, which reveals the other side of Walter Dixon, another of Koch’s remarkable “double men”.

Ultimately however, this novel is about the getting of wisdom, a theme as limitless in scope as humanity, but the writer’s task is to condense it for readers. The triptych form allows Hugh Dixon’s life to be viewed against the backdrop of two centuries, each with its own wisdom. Experience can be a bitter teacher: young Hugh falls unwisely in love and falls out painfully with his mentor, in one of those heart-rending love triangles Koch depicts so capably. But sorrows are tempered with the joys of a new and flourishing career, by the renewal of old friendships and by poignant reconciliation. The writing is beautiful: supple, accessible prose interspersed with poetically charged passages that describe the magnificent Tasmanian landscape and which have become one of Koch’s trademarks.

And like his other works, Lost Voices has the kaleidoscopic quality that ensures it will be read over and over. It has a masterly balance of shadow and light, the chiaroscuro beloved of black-and-white artists, but here deployed with many deft touches of colour and humour: the destiny of the delectable Moira Doran might elicit a wry smile from some readers. It was somewhat reminiscent of Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, in which the “burning love” of devoutly Catholic Cordelia Flyte is poured out upon “serum-injections and de-lousing powder”.[12]

In the busy online commentary that has attended the launch of Lost Voices, it has been suggested that at least one character is drawn very clearly and obviously from life.[13] In his article in the November Quadrant, Jamie Grant notes that Koch has given such friends as Les Murray “walk-on roles” more in the manner that might be utilised by the director of a film.[14] This does not seem at all unreasonable for, as Grant’s article also points out, writers, as well as artists, draw from life: always have and always will. The alchemy of art is similar to that of writing, a point that emerges frequently from Lost Voices. Models are often astonished by what an artist sees in them; it is a wondrous mutual gift, but not without its dangers. Most importantly, it is a gift to share with the world.

I bought my copy of Lost Voices at Mascot in one of the airport’s bookshops. I also browsed around in the other bookshop, and report with great pleasure that this book was to be found there under the in-store designate of “Australia’s Finest”. I can’t put it better than that: this novel is recommended without reservation to intelligent readers of all ages.

Dr Pauline Farley is an academic and educator who lives in Perth.