- A New Name for the Colour Blue, by Annette Marner. Wakefield Press. $24.95.
Poetry and prose confer different disciplines and considering a first novel from a writer who is arguably good at both can be diverting.
I am not familiar with Annette Marner's poetry, but since her first collection, Women with their Faces on Fire, won an award, I guess it is reasonable to suppose a level of achievement. Her first novel, a new name for the colour blue, also won an award, and comes with some glowing cover commendations, with which I mostly agree - with some reservation.
Annette Marner has a PhD in creative writing, and I have, over many years, become increasingly sceptical about writing courses, despite having taken one myself, and later - against my better judgment - even agreeing to teach one, if only for a small coastal community.
Picasso once suggested that painting can't be taught, but might be found, and I suspect this is true of writing.
Of course, there is value in teaching some aspects of narrative fiction, but ultimately, the journey towards finding your own voice as a writer needs to be travelled alone. Individual style is linked to personality rather than instruction and cannot be taught, or ever worse, contrived.
And this where my reservation chiefly occurs; there are some beautifully written passages, many describing Adelaide and the quality of light on the Flinders Ranges, but overall - and to my taste, at least - a prevailing sense of 'poetic' intensity risks pushing text ahead of context.
The story belongs to Cassandra, with a vividly individual narrative that tests the floodgates for the number of sentences beginning with a first-person singular pronoun and managing to get away with it. Cassandra is an arts administrator in Adelaide, who has once been a promising artist, but no longer paints, for reasons that apply the lynch pin of the plot. She is lonely, haunted by memories of her childhood, growing up Catholic on a remote farm, with an emotionally repressed mother, strict father, and two bullying brothers, and mourning the disappearance of her close friend, an Indigenous girl called Tania.
Cassandra escapes into the impetuous passion of a relationship with a saxophonist called Stephen, that turns sour with fear, causing her to flee back to her childhood home in search of sexual, artistic and family identity.
This is an ambitious first novel about art, memory and redemptive love, that achieves much of its intended reach in noticeably colourful style.
- Ian McFarlane is an author, reviewer and sometime poet.
