The Voices
by Susan Elderkin
Fourth Estate £16.99, pp336
There is a lot of atmosphere in this book: the moods that hang awkwardly between ill-matched, inarticulate people; the heat and savage landscape of Western Australia; the terrible sadness that comes from not being loved.
There's so much atmosphere, in fact, that there's scarcely any room for anything else. The novel's ostensible subject is Billy Saint, a boy unloved by his bewildered car-mechanic father and sharp-tongued, disappointed mother, a kid who has more in common with the kangaroos in the bush and the rocks on the ground than with his family. But Susan Elderkin's real subject is the land, its past no longer respected, its future despoiled.
So attuned is Billy to the land that he hears its ancestral voices. But we already know that in his twenties, Billy will turn up in hospital with dreadful, mysterious injuries only previously seen on Aborigines. Doctors will want to diagnose him as schizophrenic, which is what they call it now when people hear voices. The plot, such as it is, hangs on the slow revelation of what has happened to make him like this. But far from coming into focus as he matures, the novel grows increasingly allegorical and he fades.
Elderkin's themes, including, crucially, the need to love children into their future, could easily have tipped over into triteness and sentimentality. You can see that she has decided to circumvent this by making her Voices petulant, irritable and slightly ridiculous. Though used to living in trees, they acquire televisions and mobile phones ('You think they will help?' asks the Wind) in their effort to regain communication, and grumpily smoke spliffs when they don't.
But this only works up to a point. The Voices often seem mannered, a bit irritating. The sometimes wildly surreal action can seem deliberately confusing. I found myself suspecting that the narration was withholding information, remaining wilfully opaque.
Susan Elderkin won the Betty Trask Prize for her first novel, Sunset Over Chocolate Mountains, and was named one of Granta's Best of Young British Novelists, and there are many excellent things in this book. You can't fault her powers of description: she writes of a salt lake that in summer 'crusts up and sends back the blue of the sky like a slap'.
But too often, the book reads as if she were determined to prove that she has got inside Australia and eviscerated it. She has the lingo and she has the rough rhythms, but a little goes a long way. There is too much of the 'rows of deep-fried chiko rolls, hot chooks and dingo pups, grease spots steadily seeping through the greaseproof paper wrappings'. There is nickel-mining detail overload when the action needs to gather pace rather than slow down.
The themes of The Voices are ambitious and the novel is admirable in many ways. But I kept waiting for the characters, who moved me a great deal, to coalesce into a story, to shake themselves free of the research and take off - and they didn't. I wanted to weep for Billy, and I was annoyed in the end that he was diminished, made to seem just not that important. He and the others were carrying too much weight, too much of the schema showed through, and, in the end, the novel felt just too much like an argument.
