Original Face

By Nicholas Jose, Artarmon: Giramondo Publishing, 2005, 308 pages, paperback, $27.95. Reviewed by Mads Clausen in the July 2006 issue.

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Based on a true murder, Original Face, Jose's thriller-cum-novel, opens with the first of many taxi-fares across the Glebe Island Bridge and with a body found in a rubbish tip, face sliced off in an attempt to erase the victim's identity. The search for the identity of this horribly mutilated corpse reverberates throughout the book (and the stunning front-cover), setting in motion a chain of events that extend far beyond the criminal investigation.

Set in a pulsating, but oftentimes seamy and dangerous Sydney, where criminal ties and even Chinese government meddling are plentiful, the plot of the novel moves restlessly through streetscapes and restaurants, from a succession of low-rent apartments and boarding houses sheltering recently arrived immigrants to rubbish tips with occasional excursions to more affluent locations, including Sydney's signature landmarks and the townhouses of the creative classes, with the shrill chatter of talk back radio continually playing in the background, 'snarling and accusatory'. The incursions into modern-day Struggle Town stand out, as in Jose's portrayal of the Fairview Heights apartment blocks, 'Italians and Greeks first, then Lebanese, Vietnamese and Turks. Now Chinese. And Iranians. And Russians. From wherever in the world there was hardship, turmoil and some stubborn residue of hope'. This sense of flux pervades the novel.

While the book opens and closes with bodyguard and henchman Daozi, 'the Knife', it belongs to cluey Beijing-born taxi-driver and photographer Lewis Lin. An escapee from the Tiananmen massacre, Lin is 'one of those who had taken advantage of the opportunity to leave China in the wake of the violence at Tiananmen' by using the Bob Hawke visa -- the latter named unofficially for 'the Prime Minister who wept in parliament for the slaughtered youth of his favourite foreign county'. On Tiananmen Square, Lin had taken photos of the dead and the dying, some of which he later used to gain entrance to Australia as a political refugee. Living with his brother's family and his elderly father, Lin 'preferred to keep a distance from Chinatown with its gangs and support groups and mesh of obligations'. Much of the plot revolves around Lin's fares, which Jose uses to introduce the other characters, including Bernie Mittel, one-time Oscar-winning director of photography; Reg Spivak, the manager of the Pleasant Vale rubbish tip, a 'New Australian' of Yugoslavian origin; and masseuse Jasmine. Other characters include Detective Sergeant 'Ginger' Rogers of the Pleasant Vale Police and Constable Shelly Swert, a tough and street-smart tae-kwon-do expert. Jasmine is the former fiancée of the man supposedly found dead and mutilated at the rubbish tip, student/gardener Zhou Huang. Through these encounters, Lewis Lin eventually comes into contact with Ah Mo, a former violinist of some note, now an immigration racketeer. A fellow post-Tiananmen refugee, Ah Mo once led the Chinese Democracy League in Australia, but eventually 'cleaned out' the League's account.

Much like Jose's earlier novel The Custodians, Original Face features prominently a megalomaniac Chinese character with designs on Australia, perhaps as a tongue-in-cheek reference to traditional Australian anxieties. The deluded but clearly ruthless Ah Mo confides in Lewis Lin that 'the Australians think this place is theirs but by what right? They have done nothing to develop it, except for the beach maybe ... They have no real civilisation of their own'. Later, Ah Mo suggests that 'we Chinese amount to one-fifth of the world's population so we are entitled to one-fifth of the world's land and sea and one-fifth of its wealth ... We Chinese have the longest history of any people today. By the rights of history we are entitled to even more than one-fifth. We should be number one'. Revelling in his immigration-scam, Ah Mo shows his hand by suggesting that 'that's why I'm continuing the revolution here in the south. I'm bringing my own people here so they can continue the victorious struggle of the Chinese people'.

Time and time again, the characters' exchanges map out the cultural chasms that cut through the community at large, giving voice to anxieties about cultural difference, often relying on only too-familiar rhetoric. As Reg Spivak notes casually about the body in the tip, 'One Chinese. Two Chinese. Doesn't make a Yellow Peril'.

That most unlikely of creatures, a thriller of ideas, Original Face is a critical account of Australia's struggles with coming to terms with cultural difference. It traces the tenuous and hard-scrapple lives of many recent immigrants, illegal and legal. As Detective Sergeant Rogers notes, 'the Vietnamese are the old boat people ... they have prospered by now. A lot of the Chinese are fresh off the plane with only the clothes they're wearing'. As for the eventual fates of many immigrants, the novel does not pull any punches. Indeed, the Detective Sergeant notes that he 'didn't like to think about the number of young Asian male identifications in the area in recent years that had gone no further than a forensic report'.

Original Face grapples with many themes, but the official response to legal and illegal immigration is a key issue, spanning the spectrum from Rogers' daily professional hassles to suggestions of institutional improprieties. Working at the coal-face of multicultural Sydney, Rogers grapples regularly with issues flowing from the fraught coexistence of diverse cultures and ethnicities:

'Chinese. Vietnamese. Names changed, Asian one minute, Anglo the next, first names and last names swapping round, inconsistent spellings, nicknames, gang names. The names alone were too much for the police computer'.

The plot is rife with suggestions of systemic abuse of power on all levels of government. Finding the Asian Squad at the Police Centre untrustworthy and power-grapping, Rogers muses at one point:

'Once a case went to the Asian Crime Squad it disappeared behind a hedge of specialists to be used as material for commissions, taskforces, international operations into syndicates, corruption, organised crime. In the end there were no boundaries and arrests were never made' .

The Immigration Department is described as susceptible to outside influences, whether idealistic and fraudulent in nature. Interviewing a friend employed in the Department, Rogers learns that 'pressure is brought to bear through members of parliament, local council officers, community leaders' and that 'the whole visa and passport thing with Chinese has been a great stuff-up ever since the influx that Hawkie let in after Tiananmen'.

As for the prejudices of Australian society at large, Lin's fares are set to the shrill hate-speak of talk back radio. Also, when Rogers and Swert interview an elderly lady, 'an avid reader of the Telegraph', she professes her fear of being 'mugged and raped on the way home and left for dead' by the Asian immigrants moving into her suburb.

There is much to be admired in Original Face, not least Jose's attentiveness to the Chinese-Australian community. His depiction of the Chinese experience(s) in Australia is laudable, not least for staying alert to the multiplicities within the community, particularly to the divisions between long-established Chinese-Australians and the post-Tiananmen immigrants.

Despite its snappy plot, several interesting characters and remarkable portrayal of multicultural Sydney, Original Face never truly reaches critical mass as a thriller. The protagonists are insufficiently flawed and the convoluted plot too neatly disentangled to satisfy the demands and protocols of the often notoriously predictable thriller genre. More problematic, however, is the rather heavy-handed ending wherein the cast, minus deceased baddies, takes part in the wedding of two main characters. By wrapping things up too neatly, deux ex machina, the narrative is robbed of the tension and sense of flux that had been its strongest suits.

However, despite these minor quibbles, it is obvious that Jose has created a fine literary thriller/suspense novel, and that he is to be commended for boldly seeking to merge such disparate genres.

Citation

• Mads Clausen. 'Review: Original Face by Nicholas Jose' [online]. Network Review of Books (Perth, Australian Public Intellectual Network), July 2006. Availability: <please cite the web address here> ISSN 1833-0932. [accessed 18 June 2013].

Back Cover Blurb

• The drama begins with a body dumped in south-western Sydney - skinned, with no face. Lewis Lin, taxi driver, photographer, recent arrival from Beijing, happens to be at the scene. With detectives Ginger Rogers and Shelley Swert in pursuit, Lin finds himself drawn into a deadly immigration racket, with a cast which includes a film-maker just in from LA, a Buddhist monk, a millionaire bachelor artist, a masseuse, a maniacal violinist, and a refugee assassin. Part thriller, part ethnic noir, dark and comic by turns, Original Face offers a sensuous and highly coloured portrait of the jostling energies that make up life in the contemporary Australian city.
  
  Drawing its title from an ancient Zen koan, the novel traces the complicated manoeuvres by which people mask their identities, and the accidental pathways by which these hidden selves come to light.
  
  Nicholas Jose was Cultural Counsellor at the Australian Embassy in Beijing from 1987-1990, and has written widely on contemporary Asian and Australian culture. He is the author of seven highly regarded novels, three of which, Avenue of Eternal Peace, The Rose Crossing and The Red Thread, deal with Chinese subjects.

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