Book Review: Spirit Of Progress

Book cover of Spirit Of Progress. Photo / Supplied

Spirit Of Progress by Steven Carroll
HarperCollins $36.99

Constructed in the manner of ensemble films such as Nashville, Grand Canyon and Crash, where the lives of disparate characters intersect, but written with a light touch, this novel by the award-winning Australian writer Carroll again refracts the lives of some characters who have populated his previous work.

Although the first chapter finds the adult Michael - who appeared as a child in The Art Of The Engine Driver and a teenager in The Gift Of Speed - in a railway station in Paris in December 1977, the bulk of the story is set in Melbourne in mid-1946 when emotionally battered, stick-figure men have returned from the war.

On the platform of Flinders St Station they are observed by engine driver Vic (soon to become Michael's father) in all their weakness.

"And, as they walk back into the world they left behind in another age altogether, the children take their damaged hands. And so it begins, the process of passing the damage on."

There is little violence in the discrete but interlocked chapters that follow, but losses of many kinds are evident, not the least of lives lost to the relentless wheel of time which robs people of relevance and memories.

A journalist and a photographer go to see an old woman who has pitched her tent on the fringe of the city; the subsequent photograph piques the imagination of an artist who meets with the journalist and subsequently turns the photo into a painting; the woman proves to be Vic's aunt; there is a property developer in the wings and an old farmer who watches over the old woman.

The woman's portrait - this part of the novel inspired by the actual story behind Sidney Nolan's portrait Woman And Tent of the same year, Nolan's subject being Carroll's great-aunt Katherine - becomes a pivot in the latter part of the novel, as does Katherine who would fight back progress with all the futility of one from "an empire that no longer exists".

The developer Webster is an underdrawn and somewhat clichéd character as the face of progress (perhaps he gets more space in the next instalment?) and the name of the titular train which Vic admires becomes a heavy-handed metaphor.

Some may find the lack of dialogue here - it is predominantly internal narrative given authorial voice - leads to a flat and remote tone. But, as with Calvino, that uniformity allows for philosophical observations to be woven through, and time and place run parallel. At the start as Michael boards his train in Paris "he will look out upon one world and inward upon another. Two landscapes, travelling side by side".

The past is ever-present in these pages but the future hangs more heavily.

Both the journalist George and the painter Sam yearn for the intellectual world beyond Melbourne, although George notes "when they all finally leave this place they can't wait to be shot of they just might find that they have left their best behind them, and that pressure cooker of a city at war the best thing that ever happened to them".

Carroll shuffles characters, time, history and fiction with all the assurance of professional card player. With Spirit Of Progress he unfolds another strong hand.

Graham Reid is an Auckland writer and reviewer.