Tassie
Mind for Murder
Christopher Bantick
The Sunday
Tasmanian,
2003
From the opening page of
The
Butterfly Stalker, we sense something ominous is about to
occur.
Robyn Friend’s novel is one of those rare books which is both
frighteningly plausible and compelling.
Although a well-plotted and determined crime is at the centre of
the
story, Friend cajoles us into thinking that perhaps it is a figment of
our imagination. This is a clever book.
Friend lives in Launceston. The novel is set in a place which is
not
with any certainty Launceston, but there are temptations to see it so.
It is, however, a very Tasmanian story.
In the opening chapter, we are told the protagonist, Theodora
Dante, is
writing a history of the unnamed city. ‘Not a particularly
adventurous
task,’ she says. ‘More a join-the-dots companion
for the sightseer.’
This might seem innocent enough, but beguiling readers is
Friend’s
strength. We soon realise that Dante is also intent upon killing
Daniel, a stained-glass artist who lives in a nearby deconsecrated
church.
The story is told.by Dante.
‘The first person enables me to get murky,’ Friend
says. ‘I can go
deep
into the psychology of a character.
‘It cuts out the distance between the reader and the writer.
It
gets
the material of the story and the reader together
immediately. No
one is relaying it through a third person.
‘I like playing around with what goes on in the human mind.
The
first
person enables the reader to experience thoughts more
directly.’
It doesn’t take us long to realise that Dante is a seriously
unbalanced
character. Her coolness in her self-acceptance that she will commit
murder is chilling.
So too is her voyeuristic absorption with the lives of those who
live
with her in what was once an inn but is now divided into three flats.
There is the ‘too starched’ nursing sister, Suza,
who’s having an
affair with a local clergyman.
She tells Dante, and us, that this is her mission; she is
‘rescuing him
from his church, from his religion.’
Then there is Angela and Hadley, living out an ‘intense
nightmare
of
married life.’
These are interesting diversions to the overall narrative thrust
of the
story. What dominates is the city and the church where Daniel lives.
Friend says that she left the city location unidentified for a
particular reason.
‘It is not Launceston but a geographically fictionalised
place. It
could be any city anywhere. Then again, if you take a whole lot of
impressions of where you live, they come out in other ways.’
We are told that the city is on an island. Dante is anything but
murky
when she declares: ‘Now, when you understand it is this
islandness
explains much of the psyche here...’ we feel there is
something about
the isolation which has prompted her to stalk Daniel.
Friend says the depths or Dante’s thinking fits with her
understanding
of Tasmania
‘For me, Tasmania is paradoxical, a place of startling light
and
dark
places. Here there are pastelled shades and a gothic feeling as well.
It’s never wholly one thing or the other.’
It would be misleading to read this story as a subtle warning that
it
is life on the island which is responsible for her behaviour. She is
simply mad.
Needless to say, Daniel and butterflies are connected. All the
more so
as he made the paperweight, a butterfly enclosed in glass, which Dante
intends as her murder weapon.
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Fiction
The
Butterfly
Stalker
Cameron Woodhead
The Age, 19
July 2003
Robyn Friend’s second novel is a second-rate psychological
thriller in
which the narrator, a local historian called Theadora Dante, plots to
kill a stained-glass artist who inhabits a nearby church. From her
third-storey apartment, she observes the romantic foibles and domestic
disputes of the women living beneath her, while unearthing the darkest
secrets of the island city she inhabits. The way that Friend
interweaves past and present is mildly absorbing but her prose is
purple and prone to affectation. And if
The Butterfly Stalker
is typical,
the editorial standards at Black Pepper leave much to be desired. The
book contains solecisms that would induce wild lamentation in the
reader if they weren't so unintentionally hilarious, How cool are
‘lava
floes’, for example? And how long do you have to wait if
something is
‘on queue’?
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The Butterfly
Stalker by
Robyn Friend
Sumanyu Satpathy
Newsletter IASA
(online),
Indian Association for the Study of Australia, February 2003
Set in a nameless city, which nonetheless shares a close resemblance
with Launceston in Tasmania,
The
Butterfly Stalker tells the story of Theadora Dante, its
narrator-protagonist. She has been commissioned by the City Council to
write the official history of the city in which she lives. While
researching her subject, Thea comes across archival material that
threatens to unmask the powers that be, exposing the horrible doings of
their ancestors, the island’s first settlers in the
mid-Victorian era.
Using these bits of information she begins to chart another history,
the sordid unpublishable story of the ancestors of the city’s
present
lawmakers. She lives in a top-floor flat of what was earlier an inn,
with a history of its own. In the flats below live a couple ensnared in
a marriage of dependency and violence: Angela and Hadley; and yet
another couple: an adulterous nursing sister Suza and her clergyman
lover Paul. Thea discovers that the rumour about the house being
haunted may well be true; and further that these characters may well be
living each other’s lives, and, maybe, die other
people’s deaths.
Thea’s experiences lead her to plot the murder of her lover
who is a
stained-glass artist, Daniel by name living in a dilapidated, Gothic
church overlooking her window. The suspense of whether she succeeds in
carrying out her plot or not carries on till the end. The other subplot
pertaining to the historical exposé is also held in suspense
till the
very end.
This bare outline of the novel, of course, fails to do justice to its
rich and intricate symbolism, its highly subversive politics, and what
is more, its technical brilliance. For, beneath its narrative surface
runs a seething undercurrent of anger and protest directed at power
structures in Friend’s city, Launceston (‘the
brooding pretty prison’
as she calls it in ‘This Pretty Prison’). After
all, because of her
political activism, she has been called names in the recent past:
‘a
communist’, ‘lesbian feminist’,
‘a ratbag’ and so on. Because of the
novel’s sharp indictment of the inhuman implementation of the
political
agenda of the city’s founding fathers, and of the erasures
performed in
official history writing, it may well prove to be as controversial as
her first novel
Eva
is. I,
therefore, shall proceed to bring in some more details.
First, that the central symbol of the novel is a triptych by Daniel
comprising three images of feminine sexuality. The artist has used Thea
as the model for the triptych. The second symbol that dominates the
narrative is the glass paperweight gifted by Daniel to Thea in which a
butterfly in flight is cleverly captured. She plans to smash the first
by using the second one as a weapon. The self-reflexive novel wonders
more than once how the narrative simply cannot do without the primacy
of the number three, already suffused with Christian symbolism. But,
here, the idea of the Trinity is treated with utmost irreverence.
The multi-layered narrative is the result of many a crisscrossing of
spatiotemporal frames. That the city is no geographical fiction becomes
evident from the close resemblance it bears with present-day
Launceston. Placed beside the other aspect of the novel, its tendency
to parody stereotypical ideas and icons, the interweaving of history
and fiction in the novel makes it highly intertextual.
This parallel between the discursive and the creative alerts us
immediately to the falsity of the binary in the context of
postmodernism. In the novel, the unofficial history, which is destroyed
by Thea at the end, attains a performative status as, by articulating
the so-called suppressed history, it actually lays bare the ugly past
of the city’s founding fathers.
What is noteworthy, however, is how Friend is able to interweave the
two histories, and the stories of the lives of the fictional
characters. Whatever happens to the fictional characters seems to have
been predetermined by the history of the place or the people they are
connected with. There is a trace of the naturalist tradition here. The
main plot around the life of Thea and Daniel (and her husband),
however, is used for raising aesthetic questions, about the power and
purpose of art. But, like the other man-woman relationships in the
novel, this relationship is also used to explore problems of female
subjectivity, and sexuality. The novelist interrogates the use of the
female body by male artists to serve patriarchy, and the eagerness of
the women as willing victims. At one level the triptych is quite
obviously a representation of the stereotype of woman as the lover,
mother and witch-temptress. But Thea deconstructs it for herself. The
same can be said about the paperweight. The butterfly stalker is
undoubtedly Daniel. But both, the image of the butterfly and Daniel
transcend their particularity to the universal image of the sexually
exploited and exploiter. Thea, Angela and Suza, for all their
differences replicate and relive each other’s lives even
while reliving
the lives of the mother who was killed by George Ratford. Eventually
Angela is murdered by her husband, Hadley, because she refused to
abort; Daniel does not want Thea to become the mother of his child, and
there is a hint that he used his psychic powers to destroy the foetus.
Thea nearly dies of a miscarriage and is saved a second time from a
suicide attempt. In her fight against the perpetrators of crimes in the
past and present, she decides to first expose the generational history
of crimes and their present-day descendents, and then take her little
personal revenge. Intriguingly, after delaying the revenge Hamlet-like,
she does not kill Daniel, and destroys the typescript of the second
history. Shrouding herself by a haze of metaphysics and aesthetic
theory she persuades herself into believing that Daniel, though living,
is yet dead. And she preserves the history of the gory past in her
mind. It is this ending which is the most dissatisfying for me because
it sounds so defeatist. Or, is it left deliberately disturbing? This is
debatable.
Friend’s ideological moorings may well have been shaped by
intellectual
and political developments within Australia. After all, (Germaine
Greer)
The Female Eunuch
and
The Empire Writes
Back (Bill
Ashcroft
et al)
were
influential works by Australian academics. But, in spite of what she
calls the ‘islandness’ of the fictionalized
Launceston (or Tasmania or
for that matter Australia) the effect of globalization, of political
activism among writers cannot be ruled out. Yet, the blurb of the novel
makes the innocuous claim that the yet-to-be-published book is a
psychological thriller. I do not know whether such a description enjoys
the approval of the author. But, having read the novel (novella) many
times over, and carefully, I feel that the description is misleading.
As I said the novel is self-reflexive at many points. What it does not
reflect on, however, is the novel’s preoccupation with three
kinds of
hegemonies: patriarchic, territorial, and racial. One
wouldn’t like to
schematize the novel so neatly, one might still say that the twin
political concerns of the novelist, feminism and post-colonialism are
enmeshed in the multi-layered story, presented in the formless form of
postmodernism. In the process, Friend redefines the parameters of both
feminism and post-colonialism. If post-colonialism generally concerns
itself with the colonizer-colonized binary in a seamless and
undifferentiated pattern, where the voices of the aboriginal people are
systematically muted, homogenizing categories such as Africa and
Australia, Friend goes to the heart of the problem, by trying to
reconstruct the history of the aboriginal people. In her attempt to
fictionalize history, offering a new historiography altogether,
layering history and fiction, and avoiding realistic linearity, and
using self-reflexivity and irreverent parody as a fictional strategy,
Friend firmly places herself in the post-Patrick White generation of
writers.
We are told Friend has lived and worked in Launceston (Tasmania) and
Africa. She has worked at old-age homes, and with the aboriginal people
of the Huan and Channel communities. In her forewords and writings,
such as
We Who are Not
Here -
Aboriginal People of the Huan and Channel Today, dealing
with
these subjects she has given evidence of her concern and sympathy for
these marginalized people, helping them to articulate their problems.
She figures in
A
Writer’s Tasmania
edited by established feminist writers and poets such as Carol
Patterson and Edith Speers, and has herself written on ‘Sex
and the
Australian Writer’. These preoccupations and interests of
hers colour
the novel. In this she is a part of the process which overtook
intellectual life of Australia in the 1980’s. As Bruce
Bennett has
pointed out, in the decades following the `80s ‘Australia...
became a
testing ground for intellectual movements, including feminism,
post-colonialism and postmodernism’.
When I first heard that the publication of the novel, has been delayed
due to certain `unforeseen circumstances’, I attributed the
delay
simply to the inscrutable ways of the publishing world. After reading
the novel, however, I feel that there is cause for worry. I shall be
happy to be told that my fears were unfounded, and the novel has seen
the light of day.
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