New review lauds ‘Mural’

Peerless literary critic Peter Craven says my new novel Mural is as ‘variegated and authentic as you could wish for’ in his review in Saturday’s Weekend Australian.

In a six-column critique, he achieves the difficult feat of oulining the book’s hugely various elements, the complexities of its linking madness and intellect, urbanity and bewilderment, say.

It wasn’t ever something that I aimed for when writing Mural, but Craven has detected the book’s several comic elements, bringing to mind for him Dostoevski’s Notes from the Underground.  The funny stuff is a paradoxical challenge for readers who take on this ‘horror story of the psyche’, Craven says.

Mural‘s narrator talks about the ‘life-denying’ capacity of Australian Methodism in a ‘breath-taking and heart-stopping’ manner. The book has a ‘disconcerting charm’ because it opposes the ‘enigmatic stone’ monoliths of Brittany with Napier Waller’s ‘images of bland glory’.

Because he set himself the task of trying to say everything that Mural is about, it’s hard to find in his review a few words that sum up his opinion of it. In itself that delights me. I’ve mentioned before that the best books are uncanny, hard to describe, that speak to us in a foreign tongue that somehow or other we understand.

Perhaps the best I can do to summarise Craven’s views is to quote his last paragraph. It goes:

‘Downes understands the music of madness and its comedy. He understands what it’s like for Virgil and Dante to see the stars again and he understands the depth of sadness in a Hopkins poem about trees being “felled” […]. He is a master of the matter of darkness and desolation but he is also a fast and funny writer who can comprehend why a deranged life can be close to the centre of high art’.