Writer’s meditation on coming of age in Sydney shows its origins

FICTION
THE MAGPIE WING
Max Easton

Giramondo, $26.95

Max Easton’s debut novel, The Magpie Wing, is a personality examine centered on siblings Helen and Walt and their childhood pal, Duncan. Raised in western Sydney, they search for a world larger than the one they knew. As Helen and Walt pursue music and Duncan focuses on sport, the novel meditates on the shift from childhood innocence to the disappointments of early maturity.

Though Easton cleverly makes use of bildungsroman parts to border his narrative, this can be a disjointed novel, its origins as a short-story assortment nonetheless seen. Chapters have a vignette really feel, continuing extra like individually noticed scenes relatively than a part of an natural complete – a way inspired by the third-person omniscient narration. Probably the most attention-grabbing – and maybe surprising – side of the novel is its transient explorations of Helen and Walt’s bisexuality and queerness. These are tender and thrilling however, having caught the spark of one thing, Easton doesn’t nurture its flame.

Stylistically, The Magpie Wing is oddly muted. Maybe the occasions have modified: the voice-driven work of authors similar to Hazzard, Morrison, Bellow and Stead have given method to the subdued and fully unintrusive narrative voice: Rooney, Moshfegh, Lerner, Heti. It is a novel through which silences are damaged, makes an attempt are ham-fisted, stalemates damaged, doorways stormed by and stares inevitably clean – a novel that’s studiously snug with cliche.

There may be additionally a sure stage of consolation with relaying the language of sports activities and music scenes. Inform a dream, lose a reader, Henry James stated. And the dream of sport, if not music, inevitably proves tough to convey on the web page. It additionally locations the critic in an invidious place: do they provide, as typically happens in opinions of translations, ideas on the language, though they might know nothing of music or sport – as with all these Haruki Murakami critics who hasten to tell us how “in a position” his newest translation is, regardless of not figuring out a lot as a baka in Japanese – or do they depend upon preexisting acquaintance, if not hours of swotting, to reach at an knowledgeable critique?

Such a path dangers forgetting that the primary rule of narrative description is to have the technicalities of a given topic – cooking, card video games, whaling – disappear, ideally, into the lodging of the prose. When Easton writes, for instance, that “whereas Duncan noticed an ideal union, Walt would solely ever see the seams”, the imagery recollects sport (and weddings – the seamstress, the tailor); however a line about how “[t]inheritor strengths and weaknesses dovetailed” feels jarring within the context of the 2 boys receiving magpie tattoos – had “matched” changed “dovetailed”, the sports activities reminder would solely have been repeated.

Right here, the avowal of a truism could also be so as: artwork shouldn’t be life.