It is a winter evening in Melbourne in the premillennial year 1999. Sonya Gore, a schoolteacher turned bookseller has fallen behind with her rental payments and faces ruin. Her bookshop, flanked on one side by a brothel and on the other by a funeral parlour, is languishing. As she awaits the arrival of her landlord with his monthly demand for rent a large gold envelope appears under the closed front door of her shop. This contains the first of eleven dialogues, handwritten in a meticulous and beautiful script, that she will receive over the months that follow. Their author is slow to reveal himself but the dialogues are obviously intended for Sonya for they include minor participants whose names are anagrams of her own or who are marked by her identifiable scars or other distinctive marks. After fleeting glimpses during surreptitious delivery of the envelopes the author introduces himself at last when he delivers the 8th dialogue, between St Paul the Evangelist and Friedrich Nietzschke. He is Theo Besson, a one-time PhD student who never completed his thesis on Dostoyevsky. (In the 6th dialogue, Dostoyevsky converses with Tolstoy.) Theo writes but cannot speak. He drank a cocktail of caustic soda after an unhappy love affair and this alkaline draught, too weak to kill him, scarified his larynx and left him speechless. Sonya begins to fall in love with this strange, tortured creature. His dialogues, in combination with cigarettes, aspirin, coffee and her increasingly feverish fantasies of deliverance sustain her over a long Melbourne winter against an approaching financial disaster. Nemesis makes its appearance in the person of Mark Zitta, a lawyer disbarred and gaoled for fraud, who proposes arson and an insurance claim to rescue Sonya from bankruptcy. He has an arsonist, a ‘torch’, who will burn the bookshop discreetly and professionally. Theo, with whom she can now converse in sign language, urges her to accept the deal: immolation of her beloved stock of books will free her from the slow death of consumerism and dependence on material possessions. His own written dialogues are intended only for her eyes and will never be published. The torch, who soon appears, calls himself Photius in memory presumably of Saint Photius the Martyr, whose body would not burn when cast into the fire. Like Theo he comes with a literary introduction, a typewritten story of his life with a manifesto on purification by fire. Photius is another PhD dropout, who never bothered to submit his thesis on the classical incendiary weapon called Greek Fire.

Theo eventually presents the 12th dialogue on New Year’s Eve, 1999. Unlike the earlier dialogues, the twelfth is not written in ink on paper. Theo has inscribed it on his own body with a tattoo needle. Theo and Sonya consummate their affair at last on a bed of books; Photius arrives with his incendiary devices and sets fire to the bookshop; the flames engult him; Theo recognises Photius in his nimbus of flame as an angel and they die together in a fiery embrace. But Sonya does not burn. She stumbles unharmed from the burning bookshop and the novel ends, ‘Naked, Sonya falls into the third milennium’.

The 12th dialogue, which gives the novel its title, perished with its author. The remaining eleven dialogues, of which the originals somehow survived the bookshop fire, are all enjoyable thought experiments. I wondered whether they might not have been better if they had been published with a less elaborate narrative framework. The narrative we do have is far less engaging than the dialogues themselves. Sonya is repetitive in her interminable state of worried concern about her finances and frankly dull. Her accomplices, Theo and Photius, are too eccentric and too silly to match the millennial aspirations of their final fiery immolation.

Petsinis’ dialogues are another thing entirely. They have distinguished predecessors. In the 19th century Walter Savage Landor published five volumes of what he called ‘imaginary conversations’ between well-known personages from classical literature, history and politics. His description, ‘imaginary conversations’ has become familiar as an accepted description of the genre. Landor included a volume of dialogues with famous women among his imaginary conversations. With the exception of the first dialogue, in which Moses debates with Karl Marx, all of the participants in the Petsinis dialogues are litterateurs and all are men. The absence of women from the dialogues is faintly disconcerting, but explicable by the peculiarities of Theo Besson, their fictive author. The dialogists nevertheless steal the show. The thumbnail sketches which introduce them and their conversations are far more interesting than the interleaved narrative of Sonya and her strange companions. Plato and Homer, a barefoot tramp led by a speechless girl, meet at the gates of Plato’s ideal city of rational enlightenment where Homer seeks refuge. They debate the nature of written and oral communication before Plato announces his decision to deny Homer entry to the city: ‘You don’t belong here….Our constitution forbids poets’. Homer asks if poetry has become an offence and Plato answers, ‘Its very existence is subversive’. Miguel Cervantes and Jorge Luis Borges contest a post-modern reading of Don Quixote while Kafka and Hemingway proceed with considerable good will and the aid of an interpreter towards a state of mutual incomprehension. And yet, towards the end of their conversation, they reach a momentary convergence of understanding on death. Kafka evokes an image of his funeral pyre, ‘stoked by the very paper that one had substituted for the world’. ‘Like a hunter’ muses Hemingway, ‘turning the rifle on himself’.

There is no need to go on. All eleven of the dialogues that we have are works of sympathetic intelligence. Petsinis’ book of dialogues has a permanent place on my bookshelf for the pleasure of revisiting what their protagonists had to say. ( )