Brian Castro

Authors like Brian Castro are stateless people; they don’t really have a home in the values or the prevailing thinking of any age. And in a nation with an awkward identity, a sense of its own inadequacies like Australia had, and still has, his characters are the parallels of his own story, what else can they be but out of step, out of place, like him mongrels of history. We have a Chinese intellectual, the first PhD from Melbourne university, whose family had been in Australia since the show more 1850s, who carries his Chinese psyche inside himself as a set of cultural attributes, is always judged by his appearance, the attributes of the oriental mind. His appearance is his entire worth, his culture, his homeland. Hay, his adopted name, has a daughter, Swan, a corruption of Shuan, whose life is worse, doubly cast out as Chinese and a woman and a free-thinker in a man’s world. She is smart, sensual, creative, ie, out of step. This all starts in the 1920s, outside Melbourne in the newly developing hills east of the city. These are beautiful temperate upland forests. I loved going there as a child on school excursions. You can stand under woodland canopy in filtered light and listen to the sound of a bell bird pealing, a sound that penetrates the forest so deeply, you cannot but assume it was always there waiting for you to hear it. A sound of great joy and musical harmony – a single note symphony. A YouTube video could never do it justice.

Garden Book was published while Australia was re-writing its own history as a creative project based on rugged, religious, entrepreneurial, conservative, righteous sportsmen. Again women aren’t part of it. These are still called the ‘culture wars’, or the Murdoch press and the American right’s view of the world, sadly transported and dumped on us. These absurd arguments left us battered and divided, like any war. Except we have no idea how to get ourselves out of it, if only there was death and rubble everywhere to mourn and start again. These bloodless wars only affect our minds. After which we call the problem a ‘mental health crisis’. That happens when enough middle class people are feeling a little vulnerable and something gets done about it. If we just recognised our mongrel heritage as a country, we’d all start to be the relaxed versions we project of ourselves on the world. Trust me, Australians are not a relaxed people, we seethe with contempt, anxiety, fear, loathing, spitefulness – like anyone else. We pretend otherwise in our casual dress, side of the mouth nasal speech. An Australian rarely sounds convincing when they speak, try listening sometimes. We sound insecure wanting some guidance and assurance with every utterance.

We are dissonant, seeming one thing, being another. So, nothing is harmonious of course in the Garden Book. Bulldozers, human vanity, construction, crime and economic goals spoil it all, of course they do. But these elements also bring our protagonists together. And a real war, WW2 which causes more and real damage to everyone’s life: as if the damage wasn’t already there.

Fire tears through these landscapes regularly bringing regeneration. But people don’t recover so easily. Hay can’t get work and becomes a pauper, as a result, Swan stops her studies and marries the hard working autodidactic Darcy. Swan writes poetry on the eucalypt leaves she finds all around her, they are easily destroyed by fire and time: ephemeral until Zelmin comes along and they find love and he publishes her by an obscure Paris publisher on the eve of war. He understands her – he’s a free-wheeling and thinking architect building a modernist mansion in the hills. Out of place, out of touch, but the cash flows easily until war looms and uncertainty begins. They get each other in that way that only tragedy and separation can explain.

Wordplay, big, bold language and weighty propositions abound in this book. There’s a joke about Prowst (sic) and Swan’s way. Darcy starts to read Prowst. Lacking an education, but with an autodidact’s vision, he tries to buy every book he can get his hands on and when he has piles of money, he buys an entire bookshop from its owner. There are limits, of course, he gets nowhere with his books, he ends up hating Swan’s university friends and becomes a nationalist (with a Chinese wife). Swan is always trapped; she can never be other than Chinese. If she returns to China she cannot come back. They keep changing the rules on everyone. Citizenship is not an absolute right but a slippery, morally flexible construct.

Australians like to think of themselves as egalitarian by being anti-intellectual: no smarty-pants please. Everyone in the novel is kind of doomed by their passion and intellect. They don’t fit, see: a Chinese PhD, an autodidact reader of French modernism, a great architect brought in because Frank Lloyd Wright thought Australia was too far away, and a poet.

A friend describes Castro as a French writer lost in the hills east of Melbourne, out of place, out of step. Especially here. There’s much anger in this book, but it is controlled, smouldering through its characters. The unfairness of racial ideology – a sad recurring part of the national psyche – is inescapable. But thank god its driven through story-telling, wild prose, lovely sentences, great big bold ideas.

Sadly, no one writes books like this in Australia any more. We only produce market driven books, polite, genial, self-adoring and genres; banality is everything. This book came out a little over 15 years ago. What happened? Funny, I almost didn’t read this book, a 50c purchase in an opportunity shop while on a beach holiday. show less

Brian Castro's After China tells the story of a Chinese architect, You Bok Mun, who escaped from the oppression of the Cultural Revolution to Australia. The book's main plot, such as it is, revolves around his interactions with a female writer who, as it turns out, is terminally ill. The story itself is told in retrospective, after her death, as You interweaves memories of his own life, tales from Chinese history, and even stories from the writer's childhood into the narrative. The impetus show more for these reflections is the architect's habit of using stories (personal, historical) to distract the writer from her illness.

The book opens, for instance, with a tale about Lao Tzu and his quest for sexual and philosophical purity. Other stories and memories punctuate the main story, including:

- a memory from You's boyhood in Shanghai, in which his father urges him to jump from a balcony, telling him that he will be okay; the fall ends with the boy injured and in bed for a lengthy period, where he spends his time reading; in an allusion to Kafka's "Metamorphosis," he claims that he is turning into a cockroach

- a brief retelling of Walter Benjamin's story "The Warning," in which a man puts up a sign to deter lovers from committing suicide off a cliff near his restaurant

- a memory from when he was 16, about his interactions with a girl from upstairs while he was studying for his university entrance exams; a fire had suddenly swept through the building, and he was forced once more to jump from the balcony; the girl died in the fire, and he failed to take the exams, despite his academic promise

- the story of You Bao, nicknamed "Fishcake," who in 1909 is summoned by his aunt after noticing, from his bed sheets, that he has had a wet dream; she warns him that moderation is the only way to survive the sudden outbreak of modernity in China; Fishcake turns out to be the architect's father

- the architect's memory of leaving Shanghai to study architecture in France during the 1960s; he leaves behind his wife, who goes by the name Felicity (an allusion to Kafka), and their eerily-silent daughter, Long Tsing; the architect writes wild letters about his wife, but returns to China without passing his exams upon the death of his daughter

- the writer then tells a story about her childhood, about how she was discovered on a rubbish heap, abandoned by her parents

- the writer also tells how, while a teenager, she encountered a much older writer, a neighbor, who tells her he is trying to finish his masterpiece despite struggling with alcoholism; he explains the Chinese principle of creating a weak frame and then building a strong structure, from which the frame is then removed; her experiences with the writer became the basis for her first book

- in the year 850, the courtesan Yü Hsüan-chi falls in love with the poet Wen T’ing-yün; this foolish love ruins her poetic abilities, and when they meet again he scorns her; rejected, Hsüan-chi hires a girl to seduce the poet, then murders the girl and tries to frame him for it; however, Hsüan-chi is caught and executed; the fall-out is that Hsüan-chi's poetry becomes famous, and T’ing-yün is forgotten

- the architect remembers being questioned by the Chinese state as a subversive; he tries desperately to confess in order to escape; in prison, he builds a grand hotel, which is mistaken for a railway station, and he is transferred to a prisoner's job working on the railways; while there, Crazy Wen, a fellow prisoner, absentmindedly uncouples a train, causing an accident that kills Wen and injures the architect, leaving him "unable to have children"; after the accident, he is pardoned and sent south to design buildings

- in 1578, Tang Yin writes about sex (his wet dreams, erotic puns), but is rejected sexually by his wife, Lin Lin; this leads him to create a double-folding fan, with an innocent picture when folded in one direction, an erotic scene when folded in the other; his paintings are appreciated by an Imperial concubine, who takes him under her protection; he is executed in 1579 for stealing one of the Imperial plums, although whether this is literal or symbolic is ambiguous

- a brief retelling of how Joseph Paxton came to build the Crystal Palace for the Great Exhibition of 1851, a fusion of art and engineering

- the architect's memory of how he met Me Liao, an enzyme specialist; while trying to escape from China, they tell each other stories in order to stay alive as they swim to Macau; Me Liau dies two months later in Hong Kong

- in the fourteenth century, Lü Ta-ching is a chemist famous for his poisons and aphrodisiacs; he also designed a pontoon bridge, made by tying together many boats; Lü Ta-ching decides to experiment with a new black powder, which he rubs on his penis while having sex with his lover, A-Ma; the sex is so powerful that his boat gets detached and floats out to sea, where A-Ma is rescued by a pirate; thereafter the bay is named A-Ma Gau, the bay of A-Ma, which evolves in the name Macau

- in the seventh century, the Emperor T’ai-tsung decides to have several women accompany him to the bathroom, a pleasure that is multiplied when his concubine, Lady Wu, installs mirrors in there; Lady Wu seduces the teenage Crown Prince, has a daughter by him, then murders the child and accuses the Empress; the Empress is imprisoned and Lady Wu rises in power; the Empress is eventually executed, the Crown Prince commits suicide, and Lady Wu becomes an Immortal, the Jade Empress; however, unable to bear an heir, the Emperor declares that she die by poison, and goes back to his narcissistic pleasures

- a brief retelling of Chuang-Tzu's dream of being a butterfly

Amidst all these stories is the main narrative of the interactions between the architect and the writer, which take place on the east coast of Australia, at a strange, postmodern hotel that he has built. The writer notes that he is an architect who is afraid of structures. As he did with Me Liao, the architect tells these stories to distract the writer from the pain of her illness, although he does not realize until toward the end of the book how serious her condition really was. In the last chapter, he picks up the author's final book and reads its ambiguous inscription: "To You." Of course, we cannot know if this is "you" (second person) or "You" (the architect's name).

Castro's novel is a brilliantly rendered and moving story that weaves together Australian, European, and Chinese influences into a powerful story. Kafka is the key figure here - in particular, his story "The Great Wall of China" stands as a metaphor of a grand vision that is impossible to achieve in real life. The only thing working against Castro is the originality of his experimental style. Uncertainties about speaking voice (the novel jumps between first and third person, for instance) can sometimes make reading this book an alienating experience. Yet this book would be a bland failure if it didn't force the reader to experience precisely this feeling: namely, that alienation and exile are the modern condition, and that facing up to this reality, rather than retreating into a nostalgia of a lost perfection, is the task of humanity today. show less

I wanted to like this more than I did. Castro's poetic and labyrinthine prose is frequently beautiful but it somehow adds up to less than the sum of its parts. He slips in and out of geography and history at will, one moment in Shanghai, then Macau, then Liverpool, then Australia; from the present day to the 17th century to a WW2 POW camp in Shanghai. Characters drift similarly in and out of the narrative as Castro tells the semi-fictionalised story of his ancestry and interweaves it with show more photographs, some real and some not, to serve his central idea - the unreliability of memory and the way that all the stories we tell ourselves - even the most personal - are in some senses fictive. All of which is admirable, but Castro often lacks the writing chops of, say, a Faulkner or a McCarthy to pull off this kind of baroque, poetic writing. The writing too often seems to float rather than soar, which, given that the narrative is so subsumed to the style, really diminishes this ambitious novel. 3/5 show less

A high 3 stars, although with reluctance. Castro is a fascinating transformational artist of the literary form but I’m not 100% sure all of his theories hold up under close interrogation. Either way, The Bath Fugues is difficult, and Castro has no qualms about admitting that in interviews. This is not really storytelling, nor is it literature. It’s perhaps a novel but more accurately a book.

If you don’t like such semantic discussions, you won’t like this. On the other hand, if you show more enjoy puns about the 19th century Swiss semiotician Ferdinand de Saussure, you’ll be in heaven. show less