In lieu of an abstract

'Peaches and Lemons' is an impressionistic piece that seeks to bestow poetic homage to two diverse writers of literary fiction. Authors whose works clasp my palm in a personal and accessible way, who take me gallivanting to poignant places. For this shimmering-eyed enthusiast, the nature of my admiration for Michael Ondaatje and Peter Temple influences how I write, why I write-about places, people... About kindliness and refinement and longing and despair and uncouthness and hope. About greed, innocence, madness, badness, dreadful, pretty, fragile, muscle... This piece showcases Divisadero (Ondaatje 2007) and Truth (Temple 2009) as cunning, superbly crafted. Ondaatje and Temple spotlight mood, reorient prose, court characterisation to such extent the reader is seduced, deluded. 'Peaches and Lemons' offers inklings of these writers' charms, maestros whose magnetism helps mislay my own questioning of deviant writing.

Keywords

Poetic homage-Michael Ondaatje-Peter Temple-Truth-Divisadero

Peaches and lemons – Peter Temple and Michael Ondaatje:

Peaches and lemons. The lemon is an acid fruit of the tree Citrus limon; the peach a juicy fruit of the tree Prunus persica. We eat them raw, boiled, dried... serve them as flavours, sweets, fruits, remedies... Where the peach garments itself in the bloom colours of pink, red and white, the lemon mostly wears its coat sunny or green. To a lover of peach and lemon tea, there is synergy in the blend.

Two writers: one a South African-born Australian, the other a Sri Lankan-born Canadian. Michael Ondaatje and Peter Temple. These writers share parallels, distinctions. Where Ondaatje writes literary novels, poems, plays and criticisms, Temple writes crime fiction. Both get the atmosphere right. Both wear ashy hair above seasoned features ... They are multi-novelists, multi-award winners—their writing is matured. I notice these writers.

Ondaatje was born in 1943 in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), and found new life in post-war Britain. He sees 'a fine line between fiction, fact and imagination', having encountered separation from family and country during early years. That angst was before Ondaatje made a thing of himself in Canada, a land that hosts natural beauty, prosperity and talent better than a number of other countries.

Temple describes himself as deadline driven, endlessly tinkering. He was born in 1946 in South Africa, found his niche as a journalist before vocation took him to Hamburg, Germany. In 1980 he moved to Australia, a land that adopts its draft of migrants with more tolerance and multiculturalism than a host of other places.

Both writers have risen from backgrounds that offered spite towards human decency: Sri Lanka with its decades-long civil war and human rights abuses, militant Buddhist groups against Hindus and Muslims, and vice versa; South Africa with its legacy of apartheid and now growing crime, poverty, rates of HIV infection and disillusionment with local government. Yet both Ondaatje and Temple found gain in post-war prosperity, stellar education that saw one emerge an academic, the other a journalist. And if their hybridity, their multinationalism, has anything to do with it, it drifted them to a lifetime of distinctive writing.

The past, like mine, can be another place, unremittingly another time. My history is as a child of diverse countries, is it a wonder then that hybridity draws me?

A taste of the peach-Temple's Truth

Like a peach that makes you feel full, keeps you from overeating, Peter Temple's writing satiates you. It discourages you from bad writing. His novel Truth unlocks itself with a homicide behind the Westgate Bridge, a woman and her infant in a flat. We notice more than a suggestion of the violence Inspector Stephen Villani sees on daily basis, nothing a smoko or a tumbler of whisky might fix. Broken people, body bags, unyielding snaparazzi; these are not the foulest of Villani's concerns - his world, counting his marriage, is disintegrating.

Temple cloaks this collapse with unseasonable weather: a fire menace hints at destruction that will once more shift the world that Villani knows. So when the Prosilio case, speckled with affluent investors, brass from top-guns, rubs elbows with Oakley killings, Villani is alert not to botch this.

With his career on the line, piece by piece we discern Villani's fellow coppers: Dove, Birkerts, Finucane, Tomasic, Singo – is there a pack code? Who to trust? Person by person, we approach Villani's heart: remote wife Laurie, doped-up daughter Lizzie, grizzly father Bob, and—wait—television woman Anna Markham whose notice by Villani is swiftly mounting...

Why Temple? He is a find. In Truth he offers pace, something radical. There is freshness not just in the narrative but snappy dialogue that leaves you inspired, invigorated, remedied from dullness.

The reviews of Temple's Truth (2009) express the relish you may be looking to savour:

In the case of Peter Temple's Truth, the divide was so comprehensively crossed that we did not think much about the conventions of crime fiction except to note that Temple was able to observe them rather as a poet observes the 14-line convention of the sonnet or a musician the sonata form: as a useful disciplinary structure from which to expand, bend or depart. - Morag Fraser, Judge of the 2010 Miles Franklin Literary Award, Guardian.

and:

... consistently arresting ... tautly constructed and compulsively paced ... His dialogue is entirely distinctive, full of mangled poetry and beautiful solecisms of ordinary speech. His images can catch in the mind like things glimpsed under lightning. - Edmund Gordon, Observer.

The novel is taut. The sharpness of dialogue knifes it forward. Crime scenes are fully macabre—Temple is not for the faint-hearted. Some critics pounce upon this darkness he harbours, hunting something to pull apart.

In what author Denise Beckton terms crossover fiction, i.e. fiction that crosses between audiences, Temple is able to reach beyond the fans of normal crime fiction. In her article From Harry Potter to The Fault in Our Stars: A generation of crossover novels, Beckton writes:

In this dynamic area of writing and publishing, the crossover novel provides expanded opportunities for writers and their publishers. With access to a large, and expanding, target audience and relative freedom to experiment with genre and content, the crossover category offers an often lucrative format.  

Notwithstanding much bloodshed, Truth is decidedly literary, how beautiful to read:

Villani looked at the city towers, wobbly, unstable in the sulphurous haze. (p.1)

What enthrals about Temple is how his work simmers to a place beyond confines of crime writing where—in segments—the infusion of literary writing is poetic:

He thought boxing might give him courage. It didn't but he loved it from the start - the exercises, the drills. And most of all the sparring, the fighting. In the ring, in the thrall of adrenalin, looking over the fence of your fists into the stone eyes of the other man, a great calm took you.

There was nothing else, a world stopped. (p.159)

You stagger, you tear down the street with Villani, travel his hero's journey, transform with him to resolve grisly crime while coming to grips with his splintered marriage, atypical connections with his father, his brothers ...

Temple in Truth looks beyond the main protagonists; he takes distinct interest in secondary characters, even cameos. Like the dead girl-woman who looked like his daughter Lizzie, her skin the grey of the earliest dawn, the shallow bowl between her hipbones and her pubic hair holding droplets like a desert plant. Like the man at the café, too old for his tipped, gelled hair, silver nostril stud. Like the woman named Charis who got out of his brother Luke's Audi, tall, dark hair pulled back. Like the 'early Monday commuter traffic, all slit-eyed men, close shaven, dreaming of Friday afternoon so far'.

His characterisation prompts us to quickly grasp who is ace, ice, heat, fragile, solid.

It hums with tension. No wonder Miles Franklin judge Morag Fraser ratifies how Temple works language, 'thinks originally and with sufficient depth and imagination' (Guardian).

As Text Publishing writes, Truth is 'a novel about a man, a family, a city. It is about violence, love, murder, honour and deceit'. It answers your questions, leaves you clued, page after page, from Altona, Orrong, Essendon, Oakleigh ... it unveils to you a new face of Melbourne.

If in colloquialism you are said to have peached someone, often it is not a positive label. So if criticism must be made, one may comment on the multitude of its cast, the density of its suspense, the revoltingness of its crimes ... But it is, after all, crime fiction.

Reading Temple brings with it the unusual richness of nibbling a luscious fruit. Bite after bite I hold my breath, close my eyes, linger the taste. Temple takes me back to basics. He reminds me why I write. I want my writing to stand out too. I may single him for being Australian - well done mate; we are ace, good as them - but I also barrack him as a writer whose cross-genre work is so skilfully brewed, it is workable.

To read Temple is to find that that cleanser that perks you whole, that aphrodisiac that stirs you to act, that sedative that relieves you of disquiet. His calibre of writing offers you a basket of health benefits, darn right good for you.

A rind of the lemon-Ondaatje's Divisadero

Like a lemon that supports your immune system, repairs your skin, aids your digestion, Ondaatje's writing is remedial. It explores the ineffable. Ondaatje breaks silence in that fine line between fact and fiction, lends weight to the solitary journey of each character. The writing summons you to approach it with openness in order that you may understand its cunning. Ondaatje writes boldly. He spotlights mood, character. In Divisadero he comes at you even bolder.

New York Times reviewer Erica Wagner affirms an exasperating unfinishedness about the novel when she writes in her review Picking up the pieces:

Give in to Ondaatje and his language will seduce you ... It's no good wishing a novel were different than it is; but the brokenness of Ondaatje's tale can be frustrating.

The frustration seemingly steams from Ondaatje's attention to explore human feeling rather than find answers. He offers no solution, just a being. He moulds characters so unique, they simply are. His lemon, like the peach, staves off your hunger by creating a fallacy of fullness. You cease to question, contented to read, to snack on the sweetness or bitterness of his words.

You gallop with the boy Rafael in a brutal storm at night on a panicked horse, put your head down against the horse's neck and become the animal's eyes, witnessing its quick choices of direction. You are saddle-less, clinging to the wet-coated creature in its stumbles and swerves until it emerges into a vast field where the sky is a shade lighter than under the trees. Even as the horse doubles its speed and flings itself into the open, you are one with Rafael hearing his own breath alongside the breath of the horse. (p. 185)

Such is your immersion. Such is mine.

Such is Ondaatje's skill to anticipate the reader he uses the most accessible writing to magnetise. Mislaid, the doubting Thomas in you nods off to a doze. There is a reason for The Washington Post Book World's review: 'Hauntingly beautiful ... Unusual, and unusually rich.'

Or The Observer's (London): 'One story, in Ondaatje's hands, always leads to another.'

Each narrative, whether it is the story of Claire or Anna or Coop or Rafael or Lucien, can nearly be read on its own, be related to another. You savour the novel starting from any part. Divisadero is made up of interlinked stories wherein Ondaatje does not care to follow a hero's journey, a transformation arc or some other characteristic typical of novel plotting.

Elizabeth Wadell of The Quarterly Conversation says in her review:

This idea that life can be analyzed by the smallest details is central to Divisadero. In the first few pages, one narrator paraphrases Lucien Freud: 'Everything is biographical ... What we make, why it is made, how we draw a dog, who it is we are drawn to, why we cannot forget' ... Divisadero offers no conclusions, but it is brimming with details that allow us to discover, and recreate, so much. It gives us a world both unique and familiar, and one that is achingly beautiful.

Each story comes at you with robust flavour so distinct, you forget to ask who or what the composite novel is about. Is it about Anna or Claire or Coop or Rafael or Lucien...? Is it about sensitivity or non-conquest or being orphaned or finding place or shedding loss? It is about now, about history?

The readability is like an aroma, its flow effortless. Reading the novel brings with it the richness of something exotic. Page after page you hold your breath, excited and fearful of what might happen.

Like the moment at Lucien Segura's wedding when Marie-Neige, the woman who is not his wife, pulls a note from her cotton sleeve and pushes it into his breast pocket:

It would burn there unread for another hour as he danced and talked with in-laws who did not matter to him, who got in the way, whose bloodline connection to him or his wife he could not care less about. Everything that was important to him existed suddenly in the potency of Marie-Neige ... She had stepped into more than his arms for a dance, had waited for the precise seconds so that it was possible and socially forgivable—the sunlit wedding procession, the eternal meal—and she had passed him a billet-doux as if they were within a Dumas. The note she had written said Good-bye. Then it said Hello ... She had, like one of those partially villainous and always evolving heroines, turned his heart over on the wrong day.

If in colloquialism someone calls you a lemon, you are a sour puss. So while Ondaatje throws down the gauntlet to all writers, contained or spontaneous, as he shouts, 'Try different!', his dare is a risky one to the new or unpublished author. Ondaatje has his 1992 Booker Prize with The English Patient, its adaptation into an award-winning film. Without these you cannot leave readers hanging and get away with a critic's docile moan in the course of a flattering literary review.

Despite his interlinked narratives and their exasperating unfinishedness, Ondaatje in Divisadero manages to woo: me, the writerly reader. Each narrative means to me something. I laugh, I cry, or both. But—upon reaching the last page of the novel—there is no feeling of a satisfying, complete experience. This novel is a divisioned yet total fruit. Until I peel the rind, its structure is hidden. Its characters stir me to disremember how unstructured, how plotless, the novel whose design is hidden underneath. He inspires me to write with this kind of confidence, to write 'different'.

To read Ondaatje is to find something self-fertile, its characteristic flavour in quantities just right.

A peach lemon tea

The writings of Ondaatje and Temple are poles apart. They deviate from norms of genre, peaches and lemons, a dare for someone in thirst. Place your tea bags, lemon and peaches into a jug. Pour in boiling water, leave to cool. Strain and chill. Serve over ice, garnished with wedges. Open your palate to seduction, gulp a swig of peach lemon tea from the maestros. Feel your whole being retreat and kindle.