The Lovemakers II

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This was published 19 years ago

The Lovemakers II

THE LOVEMAKERS II: MONEY AND NOTHING
By Alan Wearne
ABC Books, $34.95

One of the consequences of splitting Alan Wearne's epic verse novel The Lovemakers into two, so that the second part appears now, three years after the first, is that the characters seem to have only a distant past, if they have any past at all.

The effect, though unintended, is to intensify the hunger for sensation, the desire to expand the present moment, by which the characters in Money and Nothing have become possessed.

In the first part they - and the reader - knew where they had come from as adolescents growing up in the outer suburbs of Melbourne or Sydney, and the pressure of the future could be felt in the way they negotiated the big issues in their relationships with friends or family or lovers - "all the great sexy things" that gave the first part of The Lovemakers its title.

Now in adulthood, they seem to have neither past nor future, and an intense craving to be obliterated in the present. There is a long soliloquy early in Money and Nothing in which Kevin Joy, head of the Joy Boys Drug Syndicate, exultantly asks, "What beats the might/ of what you want?" He is exultant because he supplies two of the great wants in the novel, drugs and money. Now that he is in love with Sophie, the lawyer who has just helped him to escape the law, he recognises that love is also a great want, not so different from the other two.

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Kev is thus well placed to offer the definition of love that rules the whole volume - "Why to know you love is love, and better:/ to reach for more than the lot". And later he adds, logically enough, "Just by wanting it love can be smack". That definition makes the drug dealer the chief of "the Lovemakers". Kev is killed by Sophie not long afterwards. So much for his wisdom.

This yearning for "the lot", and more than the lot, right now, afflicts all the characters. Sophie herself "knew no better way to prosper and survive/ than too much". Barb, whose marriage to Roger and the subsequent reception in the family's new extension was one of the highlights of Part One, is single again and knows "how the future/ never rewards, rewards were always now./ Love could never live/ in the future, it was always now". Significantly her "now" recedes into the past tense, even as she asserts it.

For Benny, Barb's gay friend, true happiness is "that unending fix". For his friend Leo, the great ambition is "to be a top shelf/ cruiser, as if the earth might evaporate/ tomorrow". Even before Leo is murdered and another friend dies of AIDS, Benny has a sense of how it will all end. "So many friends I've had," he muses under the melancholy influence of a hash biscuit, "they seem no more than ashes now,/ scattered from those endless blazes/ scorching the wildside."

But the most revealing testament comes from Kim "Spacey" Lacy, "the Shire's most famous son", at a high school reunion in the Oceana Room, one of those social gatherings Wearne excelled at in his earlier volume, although played out here with a deep sense of anticlimax. An operator from the earliest days, after Kev's death Lacy takes up with Sophie and heads the Joy Boys - he now passes as "a commodities trader". If you're such a big shot, Wearne asks his character, because no one else wants to talk to him, how come you're always reminding yourself "When the true time comes you live it! You must!"

Kim replies, remembering those moments when he'd had dodgy partners taken care of, "Abolish every tense/ but Now! and this turns your reward: an innocence/ as few could ever grasp. And if that is evil it is also pure:/ distilled beyond potent."

Distilled beyond potent - that's really something! But the attraction of the doctrine is not so much in the pleasure as in the absolution from responsibility. If you can blow the limits of the moment, you can make a space in it big enough to burrow in and escape blame for whatever might come after. The doctrine offers, as Lacy recognises, a perverse kind of innocence.

What has happened to the real innocence with which the Shire-bred adolescents faced the future in part one of The Lovemakers? It has not been replaced with any kind of commitment or belief. The social space through which the characters move seems to be devoid of any value other than that of self-interest, which is why the promoters who promise the most, Craig Stubbs of $tubb$corp and "The Big Oz" Osbourne, just gobble up all the institutions of Australian life: breweries, football teams, television and radio stations, holiday resorts, universities.

Wearne obviously has Skase and Bond in mind, but all his ordinary people seem infected by the same lust for gratification. The "spirit of the age" has something to do with it, but one wonders whether the suburban adolescence celebrated in Part One isn't also to blame. When Kevin Joy struts around as "king of the dags" and Kim Lacy preens himself with the idea of being the Shire's most famous son, you sense that both might owe their monstrous egos to the fact there was nothing in the Shire that could be quite so exciting as themselves.

The self-inflation of the characters and their chasing after illusion, suggest that The Lovemakers should be thought of as a satirical epic in the manner of Pope's Dunciad. As with that poem, you feel that only a great yawn will stifle the insane verbal posturings of Stubbsy, Spacey, Gibbo and Kev. Like Pope, Wearne is adept at the poetic put-down, as in this set of couplets on Stubbs, "that human beancurd Craig the bland,/ broke in Singapore/ The Philippines/ Thailand,/ muttering sheepish in one of his latest bars/ a few dozen sorries and a gross of taas."

But where Wearne really goes out on a limb is in his attempts to capture the hollowness of Australian speech when it has nothing more to communicate than the self-importance of the speaker.

The sestina is one of the most difficult verse forms to manage well, with its subtle calculus of repeating end words: here Wearne uses its elaborations as a testament, not to the richness of the vernacular, but to its moral emptiness, on one memorable occasion offering a poem about pederasty that plays endlessly on the word "fatuous", while in another he rings the changes on the refrain "Do do do what you done before" with "whacky doo", "dooby dooby do', "Yabba dabba doo!" and most tellingly, "deep doo-doo".

In giving the characters free reign to their afflatus, The Lovemakers comes perilously close to immolating itself. But the book takes on monumental proportions as a satire whose particular kind of heroism is to beat excess at its own game.

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