Robert Hillman: The Deepest Part of the Lake

By SUE YOUNGER

It's small town Victoria, 1952, and "everything looks hard and raw". There's been a suicide but the story isn't about this - it just sets the scene.

An American company has ridden in and created a huge dam. American bosses and Australian workers live together uneasily, violence never far from the surface. Four boys, longing for escape, decide to swim across the lake to the mountains. So begins a tragic day in the life of this town.

The best material in The Deepest Part of the Lake explores the Australian psyche and its relationship with America. Ambivalence about a powerful ally that offers glittering riches but causes a deep sense of cultural inferiority feels familiar. In New Zealand's case it's always been much more about Britain, of course.

Hillman's best invention is the gatherings where the American women set up displays and discussions for the invaders and invaded to learn more about each other's culture. It doesn't go so well.

The biggest obstacle is "what at first seemed like a complete lack of interest amongst the locals in their own culture". When the American women discover that it's the locals' ignorance about Australian culture and history that's to blame they start to research it themselves.

With a lack of self-consciousness that seems embarrassingly American, they set about teaching Australians what it means to be Australian. In a hilarious scene they set up an Aboriginal couple to talk about their culture. The Australian whites are simply not interested.

And the Aborigines are dispossessed - they meet the Americans' excited questions about "tribal customs, traditional diet, secret ceremonies" with puzzlement and monosyllabic answers.

But this is just one short scene - unfortunately many others are not as successful.

The narrative style, with 14 separate characters each central in different chapters, is disjointed and distancing. The plot is heavy on symbolism and far too simple. From chapter one we know there's going to be a tragedy and we are pretty sure what it's going to be.

The biggest problem facing Hillman, though, is the bleakness of his vision.

We don't know any more about the opening suicide by the end of the book but we understand why a resident of The Weir would despair. Lives are relentlessly brutish, hopeless, blighted.

What's missing is that glorious, biting, self-aware humour that tempers the harshness in the best Australian novels. To me, it's what the Australian inhabitants of The Weir could have had over the cynicism-free Americans.

I guess Hillman would answer: poverty, violence, adultery, child neglect - what's funny?

Well, nothing, I guess. I don't know whether humour would have been unrealistic but I do know it would've helped me bear the unremitting sadness of this novel.

When the central tragedy does happen it's almost ineffective - the reader is numb from so much bleakness.

And a stronger story would have left us feeling less lectured to. Hillman has a lot to say but needs to get it across more subtly. Less would have been more.

Scribe Publications

$34.95

* Sue Younger is an Auckland documentary-maker.