The Following (4) "...a yacht sailed into the story..."

A few years ago, Gerry Clark put a flyer on the Akaroa Yacht Club notice board seeking a crew member to sail with him to the Bounty Islands for his annual bird count. Don answered and went along. 

After a week’s sail they stood off Bounty Island (in the direction of New Zealand’s sub-Antarctic islands) and Don and another crew member went ashore. A gale was building and Clark said he would move the yacht farther out, clear of the low islet bereft of anchorages, but return before dark to collect them. He did not return, it was blowing too hard, they lost sight of him, and Don and his mate slept ashore between boulders with a flapping tarp over them in cold conditions. In the morning Clark was sighted, not far off shore, and all was well.

A later trip, Don told me, followed the same pattern as the one Don went on, but did not end well. Clark put two men ashore from Tortorore for the bird count and once again the yacht moved off into open water farther from land, out of sight. Clark had someone with him on the yacht this time, a third crew member who, like Don, had answered the thumb-tacked appeal. 

Once again a gale blew. Towards evening, when it came time for the men ashore to be picked up, there was no sign of the boat. The two on shore spent the night more or less as Don had, then crossed the island looking for Tortorore on the other side. Eventually, among the rocks, they found wreckage of the yacht. Clark was never found along with his scratch crew member.

“It could have been you,” I said, when Don told me about it. There was a feeling that Clark had something like the possibility of this coming at him for years, hardly welcome at any age but he was in his seventies, doing what he loved in a place he loved, a low set, wind swept, bird-breeding haven in the wild south. No better memorial could stand for him than those rocky islets barely above the tide. But while “doing what he loved” may equally have applied to his much younger crew member, Roger Sale, it seemed bitterly sad that the two fates, older and younger, fulfilled and promising, were yoked together.

On the subject of solo sailing versus taking crew along, Clark once wrote: “I am more frightened in storms when I am by myself – I cannot quite understand the psychology of that, unless it is just because there is nobody to give me a hand in an emergency.”

In another age, I thought, Clark might serve as a Jack London-admired model, self-interested if not quite as self-impressed as the skipper of the Sea-Wolf, a dangerous man on the sea.

The sorts of storm Clark meant would rank as emergencies in anyone’s language. In 1986, having seen his crew home by other means after Tortorore was dismasted, he was soloing back from the Antarctic on a ten week stint that has entered small boat history. Near Heard and McDonald Islands the jury-rigged Tortorore rolled five times in seas only a degree above freezing, leading Clark to decide that his chances of survival were negligible: as he was already numb with cold he would have the benefit of dying quickly. But he came through, eventually, arriving off Fremantle on a balmy, breezy afternoon, where the New Zealand America’s Cup contenders were training (he took a photo of them streaming past). The half-wrecked Tortorore limping along without fanfare under a home-made spritsail was like some lurking ghost-ship from the wrong side of the universe and was appropriately ignored by, if she was not outright invisible to, her countrymen racers.

Allowing Clark a better fate, and a more considered personality, the yacht Worker's Comp sailed into Book Three of The Following.

The Following (3) "...a prominent Australian journalist threw out the challenge..."

A prominent Australian journalist (David Marr)  threw out the challenge, complaining, a few years ago, that Australian writers didn't write political novels. Taking this up in "The Following" I found I could only write a political novel by leaving out, so to speak, the politics, the sort anyway that gets thrashed out in party rooms or endlessly recycled in the press. I was unsure anyway if "political" (or any diminishing adjective, for that matter) belonged with the word "novel".  

I was left with politics as found in the inner attachments of the individual, something like the inner magnetic field that tends an individual one way or another from the starting point of family or social group. Attachment + connection = spirituality seems to work more validly and strongly in fiction than attachment + connection = politics. Or else, is political life something other than it seems? In novels, for anything to happen, a lot is other than it seems. The political party that many of the characters in "The Following" are attached to, unchangeably,  obviously has a name in real life,  but in the novel it goes without one in order to enhance a deeper reality than realism.

In Book One of "The Following" Marcus Friendly, future Australian prime minister, attains, as a boy, a vision of consolation from a violent, murky man. It feeds his gift for leadership and deal-making. A childhood friend, Luana Milburn, struck by revolutionary fervour, finds her beliefs so dangerous to her inner stability that she hides them like burying lightning in the ground. Marcus's lifetime friend, Tim Atkinson, marries her,  and through his own socialistic but somewhat materialistic tendency, invents political PR that is passed on to Max Petersen, the product of Marcus Friendly's own late-life love affair surviving, as a local MP, into the present day. Luana, meantime, white-haired stick of an old lady,  survives Tim into a new era, where a shamed secret looks more like a badge of heroic survival.

In Book Two I hived off from adherents of democratic socialism and anger-fueled extremism. Up rode a horseman, Kyle Morrison, son of Australia's most famous poet (to keep his identity fictionalised -The Bounder). Kyle is an un-self-examined rural conservative politically, a dismal failure in his father's eyes but personally touching. He, just like Marcus Friendly, leads his whole life subject to a revelatory vision. Meantime, at his elbow, his employee Ross Devlin, mainstay of the pathetically isolated  local party branch, is a Friendly follower. As a way out of an impasse, Book Two offers a portrait of two people, a man and a woman,  with entirely opposing political  beliefs, who fall in love. 

Book Three of "The Following" is set in the present day and no summary, I feel, of its feelings and content, characters and setting, could do justice to what I put into it and where it comes from in my own life, so I will let it do its work for readers of "The Following" if it can - and only add, that like the other two Books, it finishes with a movement towards somewhere else,  an other place altogether, in this case the sea.

The Following (2) "...love and fear of the sea..."

Tiger Yeomans thought about the books he’d read about the sea and how they represented his love and fear of the sea and something almost touching on actual experience. He stood at the corner of the headland on the ginger-coloured rocks, looking down at the rusty cracks. They resembled the surface of a seaway streaked and flattened by the wind.

Sea stories so exactly fitted the requirements of going out in boats that on the rare occasions when Tiger had reading time on the water he disliked reading them owing to a redundancy of experience, whereas on land he hardly read anything else.

His choice of reading was anything from Moby Dick to an article on dinghy sailing in Yachting Monthly, but of course that magazine had writers going back to Jack London, with whom, in a rather crestfallen way, Tiger had fallen out, as he had with friends whose bombast wore thin.

When Tiger pulled out a chart, or a book of knots, he experienced a gathering of intention as whimsical as the wind, before it was turned into a surge of accumulated problem-solving under the heading of a voyage.

Tiger puzzled over Melville, who said:

Ah, ye admonitions and warnings! why stay ye not when ye come? But rather are ye predictions than warnings, ye shadows! Yet not so much predictions from without, as verifications of the foregoing things within. For with little external to constrain us, the innermost necessities in our being, these still drive us on.

It was the pull of the sea story. The broad shape pre-existed.

A wealthy young man, leading a soft and comfortable life, was thrown into the water while on a fogbound San Francisco ferry after a collision with a steamer, plucked from the waves and forced to work as a crew member by a psycopathic skipper. Another man,  a novelist and magistrate, his limbs so swollen by oedema that he had to be trussed on and off the ship by a hoist, made a voyage to Lisbon at the very end of his life but with a spirit so hale and lively that he feels immortal on the page as he gives an account of that sail. A third man, calling himself Ishmael, makes Tiger grin and wince, just to think of him.

Tiger’s friends, Jake and Judith Try, sailed to the sub-Antarctic every summer on bird counts. The only expertise Tiger had ever displayed around that heroic bolt, Workers Comp,  was to suggest an apostrophe in the name, they could choose where.

The Following (1) "...far from malign, the influence of the State Hangman opens Friendly to his potential..."

Most novels come about by a process of growth from seed but The Following evolved more through a grafting process. A few years ago I wrote a story about a hangman with mystical powers of consoling his victims, and made him the executioner in an actual hanging, in Bathurst Gaol, in 1916 - a sensational hanging of a political nature, when two "Wobblies" went to their deaths for shooting a policeman in Tottenham, NSW.

In The Following I have the hangman influence a boy - Marcus Friendly - who rises to become the sixteenth prime minister of Australia. Far from malign, the influence of the State Hangman opens Friendly to his potential, as does his close relationship with two independently-spirited girls, Luana Milburn and Pearl Dease, who remain, throughout Marcus's life, contrastingly, counter influences.

In the novel I don't give a name to the party Friendly follows, in order to elevate a feeling of political attachment to the level of what might be called spiritual attachment, akin to a gift or source of personal revelation, and shorn of journalistic and sociological methodology. There are, however, clear parallels to Ben Chifley and Australian Labor. When Friendly dies, in 1951, though he is, apparently, childless, and all but abandoned by the electorate and his party, he passes something on that perhaps only fiction can - or at least I hope can - make seem very real: those "forces of a higher order [in the words of Pasternak, denying being polarised-political in Dr Zhivago] coming from a greater depth in time, which reassert their continuing presence in the most ordinary everyday life."

The second of The Following's three Books takes up the story of Kyle Morrison, son of Australia's most famous poet, The Bounder. The action moves to a pastoral property in North-Western NSW in the 1970s, apparently far-removed from the working-class Friendly political world. But in fact nested inside Kyle Morrison's seeming backwater are all ingredients of conflict and reconciliation building from Book One.

Book Three moves into the present day, where, on the South Coast of NSW, at the height of a recent summer, a group of old friends including an affable PR hack, Tiger Yeomans,  and Max Petersen, MP, a backbencher, get together as they have annually for many years though in heightened emotional circumstances. The grafting here is about as close to autobiographical as anything I've written. But its roots (or I should say scions) are hidden. These are only a few hints of "The Following".