Reviewed by Tim Milfull

Malcolm McEacharn was one of those larger-than-life nineteenth-century figures: a self-made man who built up a massive fortune on the back of a Victorian-era obsession with industry and technology. He revolutionised refrigerated transport in a time when export industries were becoming large-scale, modernised Melbourne’s transport system, became mayor of the city, represented the region in federal parliament, and permanently changed the face of his adopted city. The man’s achievements were many, and his exploits and adventures similar in number—all perfect fodder for biography, especially given the reading public’s insatiable appetite for creative nonfiction. Why then, in his latest novel Ice, would memoirist, essayist, playwright and scriptwriter Louis Nowra choose to have a fictional character read a poorly-written, magic realist biography of Malcolm McEacharn to his comatose wife?

The title of Nowra’s novel—and Rowan’s biography of McEacharn—is also the central conceit of the work. Ice plays a major role in both the historical narrative of McEacharn and in the contemporary narrative of Rowan and his unconscious wife. The frozen water serves as a bridge between the two narratives thematically and technically, but the link is so tenuous—as is Rowan’s storyline—that Ice as a complete work becomes inconsistent, unreal, unbalanced, and frustrating.

Written in an expositional style, and opening with a grand—and entirely fictional—tableau featuring a steamship towing a huge iceberg into Sydney Harbour to a waiting, slavering crowd eager to ease its heatstroke, Ice immediately begins to lose its form. The beautiful prose setting the scene gives way to an explanation of the circumstances leading to this momentous event, and the character of McEacharn is introduced; here the narrative falters. With a jarring change in voice indicating a transition from the mid-nineteenth century to the present, we realise that this story is being read aloud. The identity of the narrator is unclear—Rowan is identified in Ramona Koval’s Radio National interview with Louis Nowra; an anagram of ‘Nowra’?—but it eventually becomes obvious that ‘Rowan’ has taken up his wife’s biographical research into McEacharn, which was interrupted by the mysterious coma.

All of these techniques, of course, have been used successfully elsewhere—Nowra himself has professed a love for the magic realism of writers like Marquez and Nabakov—and the use of parallel narratives is not new either; think Possession by A.S. Byatt. The grand love affair set in epic style over decades also is a classic trope in fiction. So all of the ingredients for a fascinating piece of historical fiction intertwined with a modern tragedy are here. The main problem with Ice lies in Nowra’s choice of a narrator. Why invest an untrained, untalented man with the task of telling a story? Rowan’s decision to take up where his wife has left off is completely understandable: he hopes that this work will help rouse Beatrice:

You mentioned to me that Ann was the key to Malcolm, but you never elaborated. Since I began writing this biography of Malcolm for you, I keenly missed her. Where was she? … As you said, you cannot write about Malcolm without writing about his great love, just as I cannot write about him without reference to you, because you are inextricably tied to your subject as he was to Ann and you to me. (62)

The uncomfortable phrasing in the last sentence is symptomatic of the entire novel. Rowan cannot write much more than vast, maddening tracts of exposition explaining what McEacharn did, and then what he did next; then there is Rowan’s tendency to wander off on wild flights of fancy about McEacharn’s unreal exploits. On top of the aforementioned gift to sweating Sydney-siders, Nowra has Rowan speculate on supernatural elements of the love affair between Ann and Malcolm, and later, an unhealthy obsession with foetuses, spiritualism and waxworks.

I could forgive the magic realist reinterpretation of Malcolm’s life—this is a novel, after all. But Rowan’s deeply flawed writing makes most of Ice unpleasant reading. There was a chance that the contemporary narrative thread might compensate for Rowan’s biography; sadly, this too, is deeply impregnated with Rowan’s simpering madness and idiosyncrasies. As Rowan gradually reveals the details of his relationship with Beatrice, along with the reasons for her coma, I found myself becoming less and less interested. Nowra offers Rowan’s own story as a series of tiny, discrete hints, suggesting that echoes of Malcolm’s obsession with ice might be involved in Beatrice’s plight. Her hometown of Sydney, after all, is currently caught in its own tragic love affair with another more insidious manifestation of ice; the suggestion that the drug has played a part in her coma is intriguing, but ultimately anticlimactic. The story of Rowan and Beatrice founders within the epic of Malcolm’s life so completely that it might well have been excised from the finished work without any real consequence.

When I read the blurb outlining the stories within Ice, I was immediately hooked by Nowra’s premise, especially after his superb work co-writing the SBS series First Australians: The Untold Story of Australia. I was prepared to invest myself in an epic love affair that spanned more than half a century, and drew in characters over an even longer time. Sadly, more than 300-pages later, I found myself more frustrated than sated by romance or transported to another universe.

Ice
(2008)

by Louis Nowra
Allen&Unwin
ISBN:
336pp AUD$32.95