Robert Dessaix: Corfu

By PETER WELLS

I admit to a certain penchant for words which lead nowhere while throwing the door open to a larger space," writes the unnamed narrator of Corfu. It could almost be a precis of this strange, etiolated yet fascinating novel.

Robert Dessaix is best known as a lithe cultural commentator on things Australian. Or to be more precise, on the European connection.

In Corfu, he threads this theme on to his canvas by plonking his narrator down in "that most stagnant of places" - Greece.

His narrator is middle-aged - "when you know at last what ... you want and also know you'll never have it".

An Australian actor of no great merit, he flees from emotional commitment to a handsome young man.

He finds himself washed up in a Corfu house. It is owned by an absent expatriate writer, Kester Berwick.

Berwick becomes the narrator's doppelganger - the kind of expatriate artist that cultures such as New Zealand and Australia used to export regularly. There's something interesting here. New Zealand had many of these overcultured people who fled their homeland because it could not support them financially, emotionally. Quite a few of these were homosexual artists.

New Zealand had, for example, James Courage and Darcy Cresswell. There were also successful, worldly writers such as Hector Belitho and Hugh Walpole, men who are now largely unknown.

Corfu is a requiem for men and women in this situation, as well as a delicate operation on the heart of this predicament. It's both a cultural search and an emotional lullaby. It is trying to explicate the pain of those people who have forsaken their home, yet who remain intellectually engaged with their native culture, if rootless.

Dessaix paraphrases the situation by each "act" of the book looking at a different Chekhov play. The dominant feeling is of Chekhov's three sisters longing to get to Moscow, to the centre of all things. Corfu stands for a kind of stalled existence.

Dessaix has a steady bleakness of view that is somehow, in the end, invigorating. There's a refusal to buy into sentiment and half emotions. He is clear-eyed and sharp, intuitive and supple.

Perhaps if this novel has a fault, it is in its uncertainty about whether it is an essay in which Dessaix's inimitable querying voice can be transparently heard, or that other thing, a fully rounded imaginary world - a novel.

The setting is all there - the bored yet somehow ravenous expatriates, the local "colour" right down to the aristocrat with his decadent palace, dogs pissing against the interior walls.

Yet only in the final part of this novel does the mis en scene click into place. One finally feels that here is a person whose words seem to be leading somewhere, while the overall effect is of a window being thrown open to a larger, more radiant space.

* Peter Wells is an Auckland writer and film-maker.

Picador

$39.95