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Inez Baranay

Author of Pagan

15+ Works 73 Members 3 Reviews

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Includes the name: Inez Barany

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Dick for a Day: What Would You Do If You Had One? (1997) — Contributor — 104 copies

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I’ve called this novel a ‘fictumentary’, a coinage to describe a book that is a mélange of fact and fancy, of documents perhaps real perhaps invented, fragments of interviews and stories recovered from the archives and newspapers of 1950’s Sydney. The ‘Pagan’ of the title is Eveleen Haughton, a resuscitation of Rosaleen Norton [1917-1979], artist and occasional journalist, who achieved scandalous notoriety as the ‘Witch of Kings Cross’. Haughton, like Norton, is a devotee of Pan, Aleister Crowley and polymorphous sexuality. The central episodes of Pagan are an imaginative reconstruction of her sexual relationship with Sir Eugene Goossens [1893-1962], called ‘Eduard von Kronen’ in the novel. Goossens, a distinguished musician and composer was imported in 1947 by the Australian Broadcasting Commission to become the first permanent conductor of the Sydney Symphony Orchestra and driven from Australia in disgrace in 1956. Letters from Goossens to Norton were obtained by the NSW Vice Squad in a 1955 undercover operation and proceedings against the couple for ‘scandalous conduct’ were contemplated but no action was taken until the following year when Goossens, returning from a European tour, was detained at Sydney airport where his luggage was searched and a substantial collection of pornography, masks and incense was confiscated by Customs officials. He pleaded guilty to a charge of importing prohibited goods, paid a hundred pound fine and fled Australia, never to return. The disgrace of his Sydney conviction stained his reputation for the remaining years of his life.
The destruction of Eduard von Kronen, to give him his fictive identity, was promising material for a novel, a tragedy of sorts with irresistibly comic elements. ‘Pagan’ falls well short of its possibilities. Baranay’s Von Kronen is aloof and aristocratic in bearing. As a conductor he is coldly efficient; his musical compositions marked by ‘impressive eclecticism without finding a distinctive personal voice’. He is attracted by the Pantheism of Eveleen’s paintings and her unrestrained sexuality: she promises him ‘the one thing he would sell his soul for: artistic greatness, the renaissance of his greatest power…together they could create magic that would make them both great, great magicians, as great as the Great Beast’. He could also be of use to Eveleen, bringing back from his annual London tours, ‘things she couldn’t get in Australia.’ Inspired by Eveleen, von Kronen dreams of writing an gothic opera, based on Poe’s ‘Fall of the House of Usher’. Their liberation in the ‘Great Rite’ of occult sado-masochism in the latter half of the novel, gruesome in its solemn excesses, could have been consciously played for laughs. But it is all too painfully serious. Eveleen begins the Rite with a whipping: ‘lashes of the lustrating scourge caress and sting his flesh in arcs of tender pain’. A thousand or so words and several salacious routines later ‘planets spin in the firmament’; there are ‘explosions great enough to create new worlds, he roars like an erupting volcano [and] a scorching river of larva (sic) drowns the earth’. Earth, for her part, ‘heaves great sighs and becomes still’. Fate in the shape of a tip-off from London police and Customs officials at Sydney airport intervenes and von Kronen never gets to write his gothic opera.

Interspersed with the Eveleen and von Kronen episodes is a melancholy tale of an inconclusive love affair between Patrick, a cub news reporter, and a talented young violinist Nora, whose dreams of a European career and an escape from Australian mediocrity with von Kronen as her mentor are dashed by his arrest at Sydney airport.

Pagan gives one the impression of preliminary research notes with incomplete episodes for a novel begun but never finished. The chronology is confused. Characters appear and disappear without explanation. There is a persistent problem with pronouns as they switch between the author’s third person narration, protagonists speaking in their own first person voices and occasionally addressing themselves impersonally as ‘You’. The fragmentary character of the narrative is accentuated in the Kindle edition by fractured sentence breaks. The novel, first published in 1990, concludes with an Afterword written for the Kindle publication that fills in some of the remaining puzzles and provides Eveleen’s second name, ‘Haughton’ for the first time.

Two stars for the general interest of its subject matter and for its fitful evocation of the garish, grimy ambience of Kings Cross in the mid 20th century.
… (more)
 
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Pauntley | 1 other review | Jun 25, 2020 |
Fictionalised account of the life of Rosaleen Norton, the Witch of King's Cross, told through the words of characters who knew her. Builds up an effective picture of the stifling conformity of post-war Australia and of the bohemian neighbourhood of Sydney that Norton escaped to and made her home. Covers the Goosens scandal, in which sex magical activities led to the downfall of a prominent orchestral conductor.

Something of a literary curiosity, the format gives it the feel of a radio play, but well worth a Kindle purchase for anyone with an interest in this indomitable self-taught artist and magician.… (more)
 
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Soukesian | 1 other review | Jun 11, 2016 |
"Everyone who has anything good in their life has it because of someone else's suffering" (Bette, p.91)
 
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blackjacket | Jan 11, 2012 |

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Works
15
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Rating
½ 3.3
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