Drumming on Water

By Geoff Page, Brandl and Schlesinger: 2003, , 180 pages, paperback, $26.95. Reviewed by David McCooey in the April 2004 issue.

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The popularity of the verse novel--at least among poets--continues with new works from Geoff Page and Paul Hetherington. Australian verse novels tend to either minimalist or maximalist poles. The former is most obviously seen in the work of Dorothy Porter, but it is also seen in the documentary verse novels of Jordi Albiston. The latter is seen in the long (and very different) works by Alan Wearne and Les Murray. The difficulty for all verse novelists is maintaining both the energy of lyric poetry and the impetus of narrative poetry.

Drumming on Water, Geoff Page's second verse novel, shows up the limitations of the minimalist/maximalist model. It has a balladic sense of scale and action, but its style is muted. The work is intensely poetic, without drawing attention to this condition, a feature of Page's work generally. Drumming on Water is set in Sydney and opens in 1938. Its narrator, Emma Patching, is the drummer of 'Lizzie Rivers' All Girl Band', an all-female dance band, and the narrative centres on Lizzie Rivers' disappearance overboard at a dance on a harbour ferry. Much of the book, however, concerns Emma's obsession with the idea that Lizzie was murdered.

Suspense is less important than one might assume in such a narrative, but the work does toy with suspenseful genres: detective fiction, revenge narratives (one of its epigraphs is from Hamlet), noir fiction, and historical romance (one of the book's strengths is its reconstruction of Sydney in the 1930s and 40s). This affiliation with suspenseful genres makes the narrative of Drumming on Water a little problematic. The intensity and action of the opening section are not maintained, and the long sections in which Emma, a new mother at home, schemes revenge are unduly repetitive. Much space is given over to Emma's speculation, as when she considers buying a gun: 'But how to get up close enough-- / that'd be the question. / Not that I could not have got him / potting from a distance. / Fifty yards or so away / was good enough for vermin-- / and good enough for Sam, I reckoned'.

These sections are supposedly a study in obsession, but Emma is no Hamlet. Neither Emma nor Lizzie is adequately characterised in the first part of the novel to bear the weight of such longeurs. In the event, the scène à faire is deliberately anti-climatic, and the novel takes a turn away from mystery towards the elegiac nature of the war which had hitherto been a backdrop to the narrative. Whether this shift in tone is a masterly stroke or an indication of a lack of control is not clear to me.

Given the lack of action, tone is central to this verse novel. Emma is meant to be a working class girl with little education, though some of her metaphors don't seem convincing. Emma's voice is most effective when she is both down-to-earth and lyrical. An example of this is when she thinks of 'Lizzie's long white dress / spreading in the swell'. Such a moment is related to one of the work's other strengths: its moments of cinematic clarity, as when Emma imagines Sam driving home after the drowning. 'In my mind's eye I saw his car / head off up William Street, / stop neatly at each set of lights / and make it safely home'.

These lines are also finely judged in terms of rhythm. Drumming on Water is more or less accentual-syllabic. Most of the lines are iambic, usually quatrameter with contrasting trisyllabic lines. This is suggestive of the ballad stanza, with its interspersing of quatrameter and trimeter lines. This is appropriate, since there is something balladic about the work. The work also shows an irregular but noticeable use of rhyme and half rhyme. A fine example of this can be seen in the lines: 'the crowds all waiting at the lights, / the men and women in their hats, / the Buicks and the Chevrolets, / the word Eternity / some bloke was chalking on the pavements'. Just as the verse novel is something of a perverse form, Drumming on Water is something of a perverse work. It invokes popular genres but ultimately offers the more occult satisfactions of lyric poetry.

Paul Hetherington's Blood and Old Belief, also a verse novel, seems radically different from Drumming on Water. Hetherington's verse novel fits into the minimalist model, comparable perhaps to Philip Hodgins's enigmatic work of life on the land, Dispossessed (1994). Blood and Old Belief is more constrained in scope than Drumming on Water. It is concerned with a pastoral family dealing with drought and grief and centres on just three characters: Jack, the farmer, Cecilia, his Italian-born wife, and Katherine, their teenage daughter.

The scenes--intense moments focusing on a character's perceptions--are narrated from both first- and third-person perspectives. The action, such as it is, is framed by the landscape, whose presence is muted but significant throughout. The land underscores the obliquely tragic action of the narrative as an image of solitude and silence: 'ironbarks that wander / on the ancient hillsides, / stringybarks and cypress / blackening horizons / in the western country'.

The emphasis on the internal lives of the characters again places a heavy burden on characterisation. Very little happens: there is a drought; Cecilia withdraws into anger and later grief after the death of her mother in Italy; Katherine begins to mature. The work is focused entirely on the sensibility of the characters, but these at times seem thin. Cecilia, for instance, seems to do little but make pasta sauce and mope. Katherine reads and goes for walks. No-one uses the telephone, and the Internet seems not to have made it to the bush.

Certainly, the work deals in absences and silences (things implied by the landscape that frames the characters' lives and their narrative), but the intensity that Hetherington seeks to generate through the work's lyrical language is sometimes a little overwrought. This is especially so with regards to the representation of the female characters. Katherine is introduced in these terms: 'Years of growing towards the body / of the woman that she must be / in loneliness has chastened her'. Cecilia, in turn, is presented as having 'offered up / her being for embrace by one she knew / was laconic, strong and young, giving him / her body as considered sacrifice-- / she made an immolation of a life, / rising phoenix-like, into this farm'.

Given the lack of action, the work (like Drumming on Water) is largely dependent on tone. But the minimal narrative seems at odds with the hieratic tone. The work is clearly trying to avoid vulgar, heroizing notions of the Australian pastoral family, yet it is also trying to cast, through its hieratic language, a sense of seriousness and transcendence about the events portrayed.

Such transcendence perhaps occurs through symbols. Much is made of stones (though whether this has religious significance is unclear), and the link between masculinity and the drought is made apparent. Remembering a reckless moment when Katherine was a baby, Jack recognises his paternal recklessness as 'all leading toward this, / drought's tight, unyielding grip'. This may be a critique of masculinity, but the association of drought with sexual sterility (and feminine frigidity) somewhat confuses this critique.

It would be unfair, however, to suggest that this work is a failure. There are numerous moments of poetic power. Again, the use of rhyme and half rhyme is impressive and unobtrusive. The half rhyme in the short lines of Jack's meditation beginning 'I once thought she believed' nicely underscores the emotional stress that Jack is under, as well as his inability to make things better. There is much impressive imagery, too, such as Jack's thought that 'This water's just a trickle / that I look in and see / my own face, like a stranger's, / looking back at me'.

The climax, while a little abrupt, includes some of the work's best poetry. The sense of unresolved emptiness is effective, and the starkness of the language and imagery suggests Hetherington's characteristic power as a poet of silence and the margins of life.

Both these verse novels are concerned with intensity. Whatever their differences, both are concerned with psychological intensity and with poetry as paradigmatically intense. This may explain the oddity of the narratives: the lack of action, the strange characterisation. The emphasis on the momentary and the obsessive are lyrical features extended into long continuous sequence. The ambition of these works is to generate the power of lyric poetry for the length of a novel.

But this stress on intensity is more than solely poetic. The Australian contexts show Australia to be a source of the intense. This is not merely adverted to for heroic or nationalist reasons. One of the most interesting things about these works is the unsettling way they present the relationship between Australia and intensity. Australia is a place of improperly articulated intensities. These verse novels illustrate the ambivalence of such a condition, especially in terms of loss as a source of intensity. These works are not so much dramas as meditations on loss. At the end of Blood and Old Belief 'Jack stands in the yard looking at his hands / that close on nothing except themselves and air'.

Citation

• David McCooey. 'Review: Drumming on Water by Geoff Page' [online]. Network Review of Books (Perth, Australian Public Intellectual Network), April 2004. Availability: <please cite the web address here> ISSN 1833-0932. [accessed 18 June 2013].

Back Cover Blurb

• This verse novel is set in Sydney in the late 1930s and concerns a group of female dance band musicians working on the harbour ferries. Lizzy Rivers All Girl Band is on the verge of a national and international breakthrough when the lead singer, Lizzy Rivers, disappears overboard and drowns. The story is told from the viewpoint of Emma, the drummer, who becomes increasingly convinced that the group's manager Sam is responsible (even though the inquest rules out this possibility). As the band collapses with Lizzy's death and the advent of war, Emma, who now has a child, starts to devote herself to seeking revenge against Sam. The book is written in verse, entirely from Emma's point of view in her working class idiom, and tells a story not only of the numerous female dance band musicians of the time but also of the lengths to which a woman will go to seek her own version of justice. It gives a strong sense of Sydney in the late 1930s and the lively and diverse personalities who make up the band. The novel is at once a portrayal of a period and dramatic presentation of one person's determination, against many odds, to rectify a wrong she is certain has been done.

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