She is telling a story about what goes wrong with a career and a marriage that might be as concentrated as Thérèse Raquin and yet her instinct to link it up with the offcuts of the broad canvas of Australian life is what makes The Fortunes of Richard Mahony so riveting in its reality.

It is funny to reflect that, in the century dominated by Proust and Joyce, each of whom used the raw material of life (never mind Swann and Bloom and the girls, the transpositions and transfigurations of personal sexual preference) as a sufficient literary dominion, Australia’s belated nineteenth-century novel, yielding the rich readerly satisfactions of life as it’s felt and sensed, should come so patently out of the skeletons in the author’s cupboard: the ruined mad father who forsook her when young and haunted her forever.

 

II

 

She was, of course, an Australian prodigy, young Ethel. She studied music in Leipzig as her fictional avatar in Mahony, the boy, Cuffy, never did. And by the time she was twenty-five she was married to J. G. Robertson, later professor of German at the University of London. Are there shades of George Eliot here, of Lewes, of Casaubon? Who knows? Only the work matters.

The Fortunes of Richard Mahony is the great novel of that older Australia that lurched into nationhood like the aftermath to a bad dream. In a world that had cheered itself to Banjo Paterson and grown melancholy with Lawson and his bush undertaker this was the recapitulated image of a nation seen through the dark glass of the mind of a man whose grasp on life is so unsteady because it is essentially imaginative in a society that acknowledges no yardstick but material success. Or which he sees in this way because he interiorises a diminished version of its values. The Fortunes of Richard Mahony is tightly focused on a man of great fineness who comes apart and the woman who cherishes him like a mother, a child, a saint. Mahony’s wife Mary (who starts life as Polly) is a magnificent portrait of a dark Geelong girl of sixteen who enacts the most extraordinary pietà over the husband who has become like a child whom she loves body and soul.

The Fortunes of Richard Mahony is written in a high, nearly stiff style and incorporates a good deal of European polish, is stately, rhythmical, visually precise and full of the points of view and idioms of the characters it wrestles with. Sometimes, as in the myriad details of Mahony’s consciousness, the effect is of a sculpted narrowness that can formulate anything about the world but can never capture the blindness that attends its own insights. We see him following the will o’ the wisp of a more refined life in England, a more remunerative life in some new nook of Victoria, always isolated from everyone except his beloved wife, whom he cabins and confines so selfishly, but who continues to adore him no matter how cold-eyed she is about his futile apprehension of the treasure at the end of the rainbow. It is a superb portrait of a marriage and the way in which a couple can hoodwink themselves through the magic scattered by intelligence even in the teeth of idiocy.

Here is Mary’s voice of female sanity:

But that night—after a sheerly destructive evening, in which Mary had never ceased to plead with, to throw herself on the mercy of, an invisible opponent: I give you my word for it, he wasn’t himself that day...what with the awful heat...and the length of the drive...and the horse wouldn’t go...he was so upset over it. And then the loss of our little girl...that was a blow he has never properly got over. For he’s not a young man any more. He’s not what he was...any one will tell you that! But they’ll tell you, too, that he has never, never neglected a patient because of it. He’s the most conscientious of men...he has always worked to the last ounce of strength, put himself and the state of his own health last of all...I have known him tramp off of a morning when anybody with half an eye could see that he ought to be in bed. And so kindhearted! If a patient is poor, or has fallen on evil days, he will always treat him free of charge. Oh, surely people would need to have hearts of stone, to stand out against pleas such as these? 

It’s a workmanlike technique but the cumulative effect, through every detail of the articulation, is one of truth.

Although it is variegated at every point in its local detail The Fortunes of Richard Mahony has a monolithic coherence (as well as a certain thematic monotony) that means that it should be read in one big gulp, more or less quickly, at a steady rate. It has a rich supporting cast but Richardson is never quite sure how interested in them she is. This is evident at one glittering extremity from the figure of the alienated pharmacist Mahony meets in Ballarat who is an even more recklessly articulate nihilist than he is. But it’s also there in the depiction of his early comrade-in-arms, Purdy, good-looking and cavalier in the Eureka days, who becomes bald and pudgy in middle age without losing the marvellous overheard quality of his dialogue.

Henry Handel Richardson is splendid at her vernacular dialogue though her notation of it in a crypto-Dickensian spelling is often homophonically inept. She does, however, give repeated signs of having a broader and somewhat more populist range of skills than she chooses to concentrate in Richard Mahony. Characters are realised at one juncture and then fade offstage to be revived or not as the merest afterthought or convenience. This is lifelike (in the sense that it mirrors the randomness and serendipity of life) by some principle of absentmindedness but it suggests a nearly reckless disdain for structure and a lack of interest in the symbolic potency of the subordinate characters.

Mary’s girlfriend, Tilly, a sane common Australian woman, is convincing but—given that she is an important figure who recurs, almost chorically, to put in her two bob’s worth about the misfortunes of the action and the further limits of Mahony’s miscalculations—we wish she were more integrated into the action as it stands. In practice The Fortunes of Richard Mahony is full of characters on the sidelines who are like the revenants of past lives. The scene, late in the piece, where the lawyer Ocock comes to Mary’s rescue—and we see tears in what have always been cold eyes—is the kind of touch we could do with a bit more of. Think, by way of contrast, of how the book kicks on when Richard and Mary’s son, Cuffy, appears because he serves as a foil to both his parents.