Follow the yellow brick road
Michael Davie
IN THE LAND OF OZ by Howard Jacobson Hamish Hamilton, £9.95 Anyone leafing through publishers' catalogues these days can readily identify the books commissioned two or three years ago when it was realised that Australia was due to celebrate its bicentennial in 1988. This travelogue is surely one of them. Mr Jacobson begins as follows:
We [the writer and his wife] knew where we were going. We knew how, and even when we were going. The one thing we weren't entirely sure about was why we were going. We were loaded down with resolution; what we lacked was a reason. A publisher's advance could not be called a reason.
He never found one. Mr Jacobson, born in Manchester, knew Australia tolerably well before he landed at Darwin Airport with the advance in his pocket. He taught English Literature for three years at the University of Sydney in the 1960s, and worked in Victoria in the 1970s as 'a labourer to an Italian not-so-master plasterer' (this is typical Jacobson word- play) and as a publisher's representative. He gave up academic life because he 'got so bored with the audiences I had to entertain that I used to fall asleep while I was talking'. He now lives in London with his Australian wife, and is well known as a comic novelist.
His career has determined the nature of his book. He does not claim to be writing an introduction to Australia, or a survey. He touches only in passing on the two largest cities, Sydney and Melbourne, be- cause he knew them already. He has not written a reporter's book either. He solved his problem of subject-matter by going on the road and recording his first impress- ions, which are easier to deal with than second impressions. But Australia is a big country. Why visit Kalgoorlie rather than Broken Hill? The single place where Mr Jacobson had a reason to go was Perth, the home town of his wife, Ros; she wanted to see it again after a long absence. Other- wise, Mr and Mrs Jacobson travelled at random, by tourist bus, train, camper van, hire car or air, to Broome, Kalgoorlie, Woomera, Alice Springs, Coober Pedy, Mount Isa, Cairns, Townsville, Brisbane, the Gold Coast.
The trouble is that Mr Jacobson is constantly worried that his readers might become as bored with him as he became with his students. He is relentlessly enter- taining. Since Australia, especially in the back-blocks, is full of strange people, some of his encounters are fruitful. But others are, naturally, banal. Then, in search of a comic effect, he exaggerates. Checking into a Perth motel, he has 'queasy misgiv- ings about having blundered into a front for the Palestine Liberation Organisation', for no better reason than that three men are sitting in the lobby wearing mohair suits and drinking tea. The motel was run by a man 'in such an advanced state of decomposition that you could actually hear the decalcifying of his bones.' Mr Jacobson amuses himself, though not this reader, by naming places, in the manner of the early explorers, after benefactors: for instance, `Christopher Sinclair-Stevenson Creek', after his publisher.
From time to time he tosses off gener- alisations, but he rarely elaborates them. He calls Australia a 'sad' country, a verdict that many Australians would think per- verse, coming from someone who lives in England. He connects `mateship', tradi- tionally upheld by Australians as a national virtue, with homosexuality, after observing some young men in a bar; but he only gives the idea, which is by no means novel, an easy flick before moving on. He is most successful when he is sour. The polyglot tourist crowd in the 'Sunset Viewing Area' at Ayers Rock, hotel decor, Australian bureaucrats, Northern Territory politi- cians, and itinerant neo-hippies bring out the best in him. The only occasions when the comic phrasemaker takes a back seat and a more serious Jacobson steps forward are when the landscape impresses him or when aborigines are present. He sketches out some stimulating ideas about the com- plex relations between blacks and whites, but is back on the road before we have been given much beyond first impressions.
Mr Jacobson is a clever, sharp man who could have written an unusual and pro- vocative book. To have done so, he would not have had to take himself seriously, or to suppress entirely his view of himself as an English Woody Allen; but he would have had to take Australia more seriously, and perhaps his readers too. They would not have dozed off. As it is, the writer's tricks interfere with the entertainment he decided to provide. The book would have been funnier if he had left out the jokes.
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