Book Launch: Geoff Page
Lawrie & Shirley: the final cadenza
A couple of weeks ago I was flipping through the current ABR and saw that there was a review of Geoff Page’s latest book. Not long afterwards the phone rang. It was Geoff Page asking me to launch his latest book — not the latest book I had just seen reviewed but a later latest book. Geoff may have retired from teaching a few years ago, but in other respects he seems to be busier than ever, what with collections of poetry, verse novels and anthologies.
This new new book, Lawrie & Shirley: the final cadenza, is a verse novel, a form which fascinates me for various reasons and which has seen a resurgence of late. Quite a few poets have gone on to become novelists — writers, that is, of novels in prose: Hall, Malouf, Shapcott, Gould, for example. What is it, I wonder, which decides a poet to cast an idea for a novel into verse? And how should it be done? It’s many years since I read The Golden Gate but I remember thinking at the time that Seth’s choice of the Eugene Onegin stanza was masterly, not just masterly from a technical point of view in that he wrote so well in that intricate and difficult form, but masterly in that the form itself seemed, to me at least, to invest a story in which not a lot actually happens with greater poignancy and emotional power than prose might have done. It earned its status as a verse novel, in other words. Dorothy Porter has an entirely different way of going about the task. She uses what I think of as a mosaic effect: a large number of lyric-sized poems tell small pieces of a larger picture which gradually accumulates in detail.
Geoff doesn’t adopt a single method for all his verse novels, but in Lawrie & Shirley he has gone for the formal approach and cast the novel in rhyme and metre and, though the particular form is nothing at all like that of The Golden Gate, it is also works brilliantly as an engine for the narrative and emotional register. Just as an aside, while we are on the subject of rhyme and metre, in that same issue of ABR a book of poetry by another poet was being reviewed by a poet who shall be nameless. At one point she said: “At times, the use of traditional forms such as iambic metre and rhyme compromised the reader’s negotiation of the text.” “[C]ompromised the reader’s negotiation of the text.” I walk around that sentence, I look at it, I prod it with a stick. Obviously that reviewer’s negotiation of most of the poetry in the English language from Chaucer down to the present is severely compromised. I think she is in the wrong business. Talk about declaring yourself a dunce in public. Really, some people shouldn’t be allowed out. I’ll return to the formal aspects of Lawrie & Shirley in a while.
Now because this is a novel, I am not going to give away the ending but I can say a bit about the plot. The eponymous Lawrie and Shirley are respectively an eighty-one-year-old philanderer (reformed) and a seventy-year-old widow, who commit the unforgivable sin, in the eyes of their children at least, of having an affair, an affair which, shock, horror, actually goes on to work and make them happy. At the start
Shirley’s car is in the lead
with Lawrie’s following behind.The face we see in her rear mirror
is wondering what is on its mind.A profile shows her still bemused
at how it’s ended up like this,having Lawrie Wellcome home
for something much more than a kiss.Or that is what her friends will say —
and three or four have cause to know.“He may be eighty-one, my dear,
but he can give the dice a throw.”
Unsurprisingly, their adult children — a bloated and self-pitying alcoholic son, Benny, in Lawrie’s case, and two heartless and selfish daughters, Sarah and Jane, in Shirley’s — their children think that the parents need to be saved from themselves and their folly and set about doing it. Ultimately the awful offspring are unsuccessful in thwarting the relationship — I can say that much — but there are a couple of late stings in the tail which I’ll leave you to discover when you read it.
The book, though, is less plot- than character-driven and, as the passage I read out may indicate, the tone is for the most part light and humorous. Now comedy may be intrinsic to the material in some cases, as when, for example, Monty Python stage a re-enactment of the battle of Pearl Harbour by the Henley Mothers’ Club, or whatever it was. But often comedy is not in the material but the treatment, and that is the case here. Geoff has chosen to present the story in a satirical light with an eye to social comedy but there is nothing necessarily funny about the subject matter. Having just watched Blade Runner for the umpteenth time the other night I am reminded that questions like “Why are we here?” and “How much time have we got?” are no laughing matter, whether for a replicant or an eighty one-year-old man who feels death tapping him on the shoulder, and this aspect of the story — two elderly people making one last try for fulfilment in love before the curtain comes down — adds a darker element to the comedy, a black hole, if you like, at the centre of the glittering galaxy of the tale. And this is nowhere more starkly conveyed than in a chilling scene when Shirley takes Lawrie to visit her favourite aunt, Ida, now demented in a nursing home. They find Ida
away off in a distant corner,
wasting quietly in a chair,doing absolutely nothing,
no recognition in her stare;no smile, no words like “Hello, Shirley”;
no formula like “Hello, dear”.Shirley stoops to take her hand
and, fighting back a hidden tear,sighs to Lawrie, close beside her,
“There’s no one in there any more.”Eventually, they turn about
and walk back down the corridor.Cross-fade to a final shot
of Ida’s vacant, lunar face,a kind of undiscovered planet
staring coldly into space.
A novel in verse, I’ve been calling it, but the book actually describes itself as a movie in verse, which uses, as the blurb says, the conventions of screenwriting as a frame or vehicle. That line I’ve just quoted, “Cross-fade to a final shot”, gives you an idea. Each of the book’s forty-seven parts or chapters begins with the scene-setting words INTERIOR or EXTERIOR, followed by DAY or NIGHT, as the case may be, and the scene is presented to us almost as a prospective screenwriter might make his pitch to the suits, reading the scenario to them. A scene may be set (“EXTERIOR. NIGHT. The carpark now…”) or the lens may zoom in or back (“A line of helicopter shots// shows us night in Canberra./ Their little cars are just two dots”). This procedure has a quite peculiar effect at times, a sort of distancing, estranging effect, because we simultaneously see what is happening and yet may not fully know what is happening. Take the beginning of Chapter 8:
INTERIOR. NIGHT. A restaurant,
not a very flash affair.We see our lovers through the window
via the camera’s silent stare.We hear the traffic, not the words
they seem to tenderly exchange…
Our narrator, in other words, is not omniscient. In fact, the narrator’s pronoun throughout is the first person plural. We, the viewers, narrate what we see and only hear what the soundtrack lets us hear at any given time. There is also a musical soundtrack, you’ll be interested to learn, which alternates between Shirley’s saccharine taste for the likes of Mantovani and Lawrie’s unexpected but gratifying preference for the baroque, and these musical strains and themes inform the different parts of the story almost as much as the cinematic conventions.
To return to matters prosodic, Lawrie & Shirley is cast in tetrameter, mostly iambic, but mixed with trochees, in couplets which are actually separated quatrains rhyming ABCB. Geoff has a fondness for the shorter line; like Gwen Harwood he generally eschews pentameter. Certainly, as I said earlier this metre propels the narrative forward at a brisk pace and seems particularly suited to the satirical and humorous tone, although, as that scene with Aunt Ida showed, it can hold weightier matters too. And, in a poem which is 120 pages long, he handles rhyme with panache and variety. Such as:
It’s only when they’re married and
are honchas of their happy houseswe notice very clearly that
they have a yen to wear the trousers.
Or:
And Benny? … Yes, he thought of you,
but don’t go dancing tarantellas.Three hundred dollars every month
on credit down at Market Cellars.
It’s interesting the way a single word can carry certain overtones. Take these lines, as Sarah follows and spies on Shirley and Lawrie’s visit to a travel agent.
What exactly are they doing?
What will they be up to next?It really is a problem, yes.
No wonder she is always vexed.
“Vexed”: not a word you hear much and there is something almost intrinsically comical about it. It brought to my mind — and I wonder whether Geoff was thinking of this himself — a stanza from a poem by my namesake Marriott Edgar, “The Lion and Albert”:
Then Pa, who had seen the occurrence,
And didn’t know what to do next,
Said, “Mother! Yon lion’s ‘et Albert”,
And Mother said, “Well, I am vexed!”
But enough from me. As the credits roll and the strains of Mantovani playing Die Kunst der Fuge fill the theatre, I’ll congratulate Geoff on his sparkling novel, sorry, movie in verse and ask him to come and say something on his own account.
Stephen Edgar, 2006
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