There are seven stories in Luke Carman's 2022 collection and two of them are novella length, capturing my interest straight away because they are character driven.

Joseph, in 'A Beckoning Candle', is an old bloke who lives in a gentrifying inner suburb of Sydney. In a story that reminded me not of Philip Salom's style but of his poignant inner urban characters from Waiting (2016); The Returns (2019; or Sweeney and the Bicycles (2022), Joseph is witnessing change in the place where he has lived all his life. He is losing his memory a little bit too, but he remembers enough to miss the acquaintances from his daily walks and to mourn their old homes coming down to be replaced by apartments.

The noise of building construction is ever present, and on the morning when the story opens, the tradies next door have damaged the postwar sewage system and created a catastrophe in Joseph's back yard. Two weeks ago, they'd knocked down the fence too.

Egged on by Marg 'voicing her concerns' which included a lack of faith in Joseph's capacity to do anything about this fence problem, Joseph had set off to discuss the matter with those responsible. In a satire which resembles the sort of speech that maiden politicians can make — no tradie I've ever encountered would submit to a flood of rhetoric without interruption — Joseph voices his concerns in response to the cheery reassurance that all will be well.

'If it's all the same to you, and with all due respect, I think I will worry about it.' [...] 'Again, with total appreciation for the task you blokes are required to undertake here, I don't think it's unreasonable to ask, that if you're going to knock a man's fences down, it's fair play to either offer a verbal warning in advance, if the action's intentional, or if it's done in error, to provide him with some timely words of reassurance that the injury isn't done with total disregard for his life, liberty and pursuit of happiness. I'm seventy-three years old, I'm not young and fit like you blokes are, and a man my age has concerns, not only for his own safety and the safety of his loved ones, but for the safety of his property too. You blokes might not be aware of this, but we tend, as we get older, to see things from a perspective different to that of a man your age, who's young and in his prime. We old farts don't have the luxury of throwing our hands up in the air when disaster strikes and hoping for a bumper crop come next spring, we can't shrug our shoulders and conclude that here's nothing to worry about in the short term. The short term is all we have left!' (p.16)

He goes on. He goes on in an extended paragraph of two pages. He explains that he fears scrappers or carpetbaggers coming in the night and getting curious about a lifetime's worth of tools and equipment in his garage while the tradies have gone home and are sitting on [their] recliners watching the footy.

'This might sound like spilt milk to you, but for a man my age, on a pension, don't forget, replacing a broken padlock puts me in irreversible arrears, let alone a new lawnmower. My time of acquiring is long gone. I only have what's left to me, and so at my age every loss is eternal.' (p.17)

This comic episode reveals not only the emotional cost of the damage done to the fence, but the poverty our mean-spirited society imposes on elderly people dependent on the pension.

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2023/02/21/an-ordinary-ecstasy-2022-by-luke-carman/ ( )