Thea Astley - The Well Dressed Explorer

Australian author Thea Astley's The Well Dressed Explorer is proof that a large vocabulary does not automatically ensure a compelling novel or effective characterisation. Astley proves quite the master of spinning out complicated, intellectually engaging sentences - but her heart is nowhere to be found. This novel, which won the Miles Franklin Award, is yet another example of Australia's habit of raising astonishingly mediocre novelists to the rank of 'great Australian author' simply because we are unable to find a writer who is able to hold a candle to the towering talent available in America, the UK, Europe and beyond. With the exception of Patrick White - virtually the only exception in the last fifty years - Australian authors have consistently shown their proudest colours to be mediocrity and limited depth of ambition, and Thea Astley is no different.

George Brewster, from birth to death, is a bore, an overwhelmingly self-obsessed buffoon who considers the girth of his weight an accurate measurement of his social and intellectual status. The novel opens with an obsession that suggests an overarching theme, and then drops it a hundred pages in for no other reason than the author seems to have forgotten the character of Nita, or perhaps simply ran out of steam and didn't know what to do with her. But never mind. George becomes a newspaper man, one who delights in composing two thousands words about any subject, writing in a comical, even satirical voice - but never offering anything approaching depth or insight. He isn't paid to do it, so he doesn't. One wonders if that is Astley's excuse, though authors in Australia are never really compensated for their work, anyway, so it doesn't matter much. Time goes by, and George falls in and out of squalid love affairs. At times he remembers Nita, and at others, he doesn't. It doesn't seem to matter all that much to him, and as a consequence, it doesn't matter much to us. Nevertheless, his weight increases, and so too the number of his chins, and along with it the overall satisfaction of being George grows as well - but only for him, no matter how hard Astley tries. He marries - but never mind who to, as she is a wraith, barely visible and possessing an intangible sense of self - and he has a child and, oh, there are affairs. And so it goes, from twenty to thirty to forty. You know this sort of person, and you don't like him - nobody does, including himself.

The characters are not people but calculators, mathematically determining their actions and response to one another to best suit their own, inevitably selfish, desired outcomes. There is very little sense that any of the character's understand the others as human, or even possessing a mind or soul - no, they each see the other as a roadblock to their own destiny, as pathetic and small as that might be. As the protagonist, George Brewster is the worst offender, made even more horrible by the fact that we are made aware of his internal thoughts, such as they are. And they aren't much. Growing fat off pudding and alcohol seems to be the extent of his ambition, though Astley invites us - and rare is the reader who will go along with the joke - to laugh at George for wanting to write an Australian epic. And that's about all the humour available, unfortunately.

Astley writes with the hyperactivity of a child who has eaten too much sugar. There are times - perhaps once or twice a page, and most evident during the first fifty pages or so - when you wish she would calm down and take a deep breath. Manic excitement is generally appealing only to those so afflicted, which leaves the reader bewildered by Astley's inexhaustible capacity for breathless, purposeless narration. Consider the following, which is over-written to the point where the impact of the passage is lost, "Fragmentary sketches - preciously adult at dances, teetering on her older sister's borrowed heels, all sex and frills. And in the tree-house. That most of all, in the first summers, belly prone on the plank floor gorging apricots that they stored in a box and chucking the stones in the green air to startle birds like fish." Prettily told, yes, but the advantage of such flowery writing over simply stating the matter of things is not easily evident.

At times, Astley's overwrought language turns a clever phrase or two, such as the delightful, "She was his emotional blotter - to be discarded when too scrawled upon", but for the most part, the pickings are bleak, however plentiful.

Incredibly - unbelievably - astoundingly - (and forgive the hyperbole) the excitable nature of the writing tapers off around a hundred pages in, with the remainder of the novel settling into a dreary exploration of middle-class infidelity. Updike has done all this better, and with purpler prose (and better prose, when not indulging in his own demons), and so has any number of contemporary authors. A tiresome middle-class bore, George flits from romance to romance, blissfully unaware of his insensitive nature even as he leaves smouldering wreckages behind him. He revels in the charm of the drinking hour, the portly stomach, the jowls that represent wealth and the chins, plenty. Astley rachets down the prose to create a dull, workmanlike collection of sentences that do nothing more, really, than recount George's life as it trundles along. However bad her explosions of oddly placed adjectives and bizarrely worded sentences that characterised the first third of the novel, at least they showed a bit of character. The final two thirds are run of the mill and bland, with nothing to recommend them.

If Astley were in on the joke there might be something to all this, but one suspects that she has become too inexplicably entangled within the dreary machinations of her dull protagonist to remember that satire requires bite to be effective. George is a joke, a clearly telegraphed punch-line - but Astley never strikes home, leaving him safe and comfortable in his ordinary life. If she was to leave him to himself for the entire novel - then why write it? He is ripe for comic savaging, a character who seems created purely to be deflated, but nothing of the sort occurs. I would, perhaps, accuse Astley of being too maudlin and sentimental with him, except that she was in her late thirties when she wrote The Well Dressed Explorer, which doesn't give her much of an excuse.

None of this, of course, explains the Miles Franklin Award given to the novel, or its place amongst Australia's contemporary canon. The Well Dressed Explorer is not a bad book, but it is boring, the subject matter is ill-chosen, and the characters, overwhelmingly pedestrian and unappealing. There is almost nothing to recommend this book, which makes it astonishing (yet again - this novel brings out the purple prose in me, too) to think it was ever singled out as a book of note.

The ending, when it comes, is as miserable and colourless as the rest. An astonishingly bad choice involving a contrived-beyond-belief coincidence caps the novel, and the final gasp of theological mumbo-jumbo adds further insult to an already grievous injury. Thea Astley was a grand old Dame of Australian literature, though with a novel like this - considered among her best, and also the recipient of Australia's premier literary award - it is impossible to understand why.

Author	Thea Astley
Title	The Well Dressed Explorer
Nationality	Australian
Publisher	Penguin
Published	1962
Pages	255
Availability: ---Amazon (US) ---Amazon (UK) ---Book Depository

Links

Wikipedia
ABC Radio National - A discussion of Astley's work and life.