Marion Halligan: The Point

Reviewed by PAT BASKETT

Chances are, if you're reading this review you will find aspects of yourself in this novel of contemporary middle-class life in Canberra.

This will be almost inescapably so if good food and wine mean more to you than just eating and drinking, if you can put pictures to the names of Chardin and Caravaggio, and if you have even a passing acquaintance with the poetry of George Herbert and Wallace Stevens.

Perhaps that's a warning as much as an enticement. This book has the flavour of those semi-intellectual conversations educated, affluent-enough people feel smug about at the end of a good meal.

Aphorisms are indulged in, names dropped, opinions verging on the metaphysical are aired, art talked about more than money, nobody is in a hurry to leave.

The Point is the name of a restaurant set on an imaginary promontory in Canberra's lake. Its cuisine is haute and is the work of its chef, an inspired, rather secretive young woman called Flora for whom cooking is an art, on a par with music and poetry.

Flora's clientele includes Jerome, the ex-Franciscan monk through whose eyes we see much of the story and who becomes her lover.

Jerome has transferred his search for knowledge from the church to the world of computers, how he earns his livelihood.

His voice modulates the pace of the story - unhurried, lovingly exploring nuance - reflecting on the process of writing as Halligan slips back and forth between the third person and the first person of Jerome's diary.

Through the restaurant's habitues we come into fleeting contact with the tourist sex trade and images of child pornography and computer hacking.

Looking on at this scene of opulence and comfort are two homeless street-people, a middle-aged man and a girl.

Hers is a credible story of abuse and tragedy. His is a more contradictory character whose situation doesn't quite convince. Their relationship, nevertheless, of mutual comfort with no sexual overtones, has a heart-warming authenticity about it.

The juxtaposition of these two groups, the homeless pair and the restaurant's clientele, is the grindstone for Halligan's social commentary, reaching a high point when the street couple scrub up for dinner at the Point.

The story includes another offshoot of middle-class society - male teenage hooligans. But the drug-related violence these nice boys indulge in, with tragic consequences, appears too gratuitous to be entirely plausible.

This is the book's only weak spot. An easy metaphysics lies at its heart, consisting more of questions than answers.

The devil, suggests Jerome, is a [gold]fish. A performance of Faust in which Mephistopheles is a young woman provokes discussions about ways in which people sell their souls.

Jerome is haunted by the meaning of the word hubris. Nothing is too impenetrable. A quotation from Alice about the Queen's jam - "jam yesterday, jam tomorrow, never jam today" - reminds us of the nature of happiness.

Halligan's wonderful prose is as relaxed as the structure of the story which moves in and out of the characters' heads and switches from present to past tense without a glitch. I would treat this book like a good wine and give it the space it deserves.

Allen & Unwin, $35

* Pat Baskett is an Auckland journalist.