Michael Meehan

As readers know by now, I 'rediscovered' the novels of South Australian Michael Meehan late last year. In anticipation of his new novel An Ungrateful Instrument, (Transit Lounge, 2023) I resurrected from my reading journal a review of his first novel, The Salt of Broken Tears, (1999), and his second: rel="nofollow" target="_top">Stormy Weather (2000), and a week after that, I'd retrieved from the TBR and reviewed Below the Styx (2010). I was smitten!

And now, An Ungrateful Instrument. I shall try not to gush, but seriously, this is one of the most exquisite books I've read in a long time.

This is a novel of fathers and sons; death and immortality; and the tension between originality and wanting to preserve things of beauty unchanged. It's about the glorious voice of a musical instrument — ephemeral until the advent of sound recording — and the silent but powerful voice of the writer. And it's about a world of privilege and power and the conditions in which creativity might flourish.

An Ungrateful Instrument begins with the melancholy voice of Charlotte-Elizabeth, an elective mute. She tells us of her brother Jean-Baptiste Forqueray who is beaten and brutalised by his father into being the musical prodigy he was himself as a boy. Antoine Forqueray performed before Louis XIV at the age of ten and was appointed as a court musician when still a teenager. In contrast with the elegance of courtly music, Antoine Forqueray's style is wild, energetic and fiendishly difficult. (A listener at YouTube describes him as 'a beast'. You can see why here.)

Brilliant, inventive, demonic' Antoine wants immortality, as so many men do, and he wants his son to be a reproduction of himself, following exactly the same path so that his own glory can transcend death and live on through his son and grandsons.

His self-belief in his own genius, fostered by the admiration of the king at Versailles, is such that he will not tolerate having his music written down, to be copied by his inferiors. Only he and his son can play it, and he beats the boy into perfect fidelity to what he hears his father play.

He beat Charlotte-Elizabeth viciously too, because he wanted her to be a prodigy as well, as evidence that his genius can even extend to siring a female prodigy. But she could not — or would not — play, and at eight she retreats into silence, a shadow always hovering on the edge of things, invisible and silent as women mostly are in the historical record.

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2023/02/04/an-ungrateful-instrument-2023-by-michael-mee...… (altro)

Readers will be familiar with the symbolism of the Styx. In Greek mythology, the Styx is the river between the world of the living and the Underworld. Meehan's narrator is below the Styx, in the underworld of the Melbourne Remand Centre. He's there because he's been charged with murder. (That is a splash of blood on the cover, not carelessness with my coffee.)

But no, this is not a crime novel. (Well, David Whish-Wilson rel="nofollow" target="_top">in his review includes it in his 'broad church' of crime fiction.)

Below the Styx is one of the most entertaining novels I've read this year. It is, as the blurb goes on to say, fiendishly clever, wickedly funny, intriguing and constantly surprising.

The narrator tells us that his wife's death was an accident, and #NoSpoilers there are revelations in the final chapter that cast doubt on what the reader has been led to believe. Maybe his entire story is a farrago of lies... and maybe it's not...

Martin Frobisher (whose namesake was a 16th century privateer and a pirate) casts himself as another Richard Devine a.k.a. Rufus Dawes, the central character in Marcus Clarke's (For the Term of) His Natural Life (1874). A gentleman with an estate to inherit, Devine/Dawes really was innocent of the crime for which he was convicted: he pleaded guilty to protect his mother's reputation, was transported to Tasmania as a convict, and victimised ever thereafter by an evil officer with a motive. Martin is obsessed by Clarke's novel, and he uses his time in remand to research it and Clarke's other writings. He has plenty of money so he is able to hire a young researcher called Petra (whose name means 'rock or stone' i.e. unshakeable and resilient). She has her feet firmly on the ground and occasionally challenges Martin's wilder assumptions about Clarke. She is his only visitor apart from his brother-in-law Rollo who is a dour and reticent lawyer. (He married Madeleine, Coralie's sister.)

Meehan has a light touch with the theme of wrongful justice via His Natural Life, but his Shakespearian allusions from Henry VI Pt 2, and Measure for Measure aren't there just so that he can mock the legal profession with Dickensian satire.

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2022/11/17/below-the-styx-by-michael-meehan/… (altro)

From my reading journal, dated 29 October 1999
I have never read anything like this before: it's magnificent.

The Salt of Broken Tears is the story of a boy who sets out across the dry and barren land beyond the Mallee, to search for the missing Cabel Singh the hawker, and for the girl Eileen who has disappeared from his home.

It's an epic journey. The reader moves with this child (who is perhaps twelve or thirteen) across a landscape so eternal and vast that I cannot fathom it. Meehan writes prose like poetry, with fluid images of trees and salt plains and rotting logs all tumbling into one another, not in coarse monotony but in a beauty diverse and endlessly frightening. A boy! And a boy not lost in this extreme landscape, but a boy who is purposeful as no adults are, intent on his mission.

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2022/11/09/the-salt-of-broken-tears-by-michael-meehan/… (altro)

Deception means a number of things in this book. It is a physical place in the Australian outback, and it also refers to the threads of deception, which are unwound in an endeavor to uncover the truth. These threads are tethered with events of violence and uprising in the city of Paris - The Paris of the Commune in 1871, and the present time student riots in 1968. Nick is fascinated with the little that he knows of his grandmother's childhood. A family home deserted, a split in the family, and a mysterious, eccentric French writer. It is a story that shines with outcasts from society - those that have been outcast, and those that have shut themselves away. Nick travels to Paris, with a stash of rambling writings left by the Frenchman, and kept by his grandmother, hoping to shed light on some of the gaps in his family's history.
It is a well structured book, which encourages you to look at things with a different light, and keep an open mind about things until the truth is told. If you approach things with preconceived ideas, you will only deceive yourself.… (altro)