Mural

This is a strange book. Not just because the narrator is a violent criminal writing his thoughts for his "mind man," Dr Reynolds, but also because of its mixture of fact and fiction. In the manner of W.G. Sebald, there are black-and-white photographs of places, people, and documents mentioned in the text, and you may well find yourself checking the Internet to see whether something the narrator discusses is real or invented.

He begins his "story," for example, by describing the arrival in Australia of Harry Ellis aboard the sailing ship Surrey:

It is among the last of the clippers, which sailed at clips (hence the name, Dr Reynolds) across oceans, usually carrying slaves ... She is the end of the line, a symbol of how quickly steam engines would dominate the sea.

He ponders briefly on the rise of "new technologies," and on the "destruction of handwritten letters in the age of emails," before describing Harry's life in Australia, his self-education, and his time as a teacher at two schools, both "bark huts" in the foothills of the Liverpool Range west of Sydney. He notes Harry's naivety in sexual matters, his experiences of lust, and his seeming choice of celibacy. At the same time, he digresses to discuss two-headed lizards, a Seamus Heaney poem, the beheading of Anne Boleyn, the French view of "finding" death, the suburb of Burwood, the Pre-Raphaelites (in particular, Burne-Jones's painting, The Beguiling of Merlin, a photograph of which is included) and some of his own earliest memories. It is not until quite a few pages later that we learn Harry, after his return to England, became famous as the sexologist Havelock Ellis.

Early in the book our narrator explains Dr Reynolds has asked him to write down his thoughts, his "own admissions, anguishes, fears and uncertainties" and what "provokes" his crimes. "I find I can put them down best through the prism of someone else's relations," he tells him. After his account of Harry's life, he writes:

My dear Dr Reynolds, I have tried to refract my own notable defects through his youthful ones, so to speak, only because his mind is free, open and objective about all manner of urges and—often—our incapacity to control them. I hope this helps in your attempts to unravel me. Me as much as you.

After an account of unexpectedly meeting a childhood friend in a bushland reserve in the Melbourne suburbs, and listening to the friend's complaints about the way Methodism and his Methodist parents had ruined his life and led to his murdering his mum and dad, our narrator writes of his own experiences of Methodism, and of the mural behind the pulpit in the church he had to attend as a boy, and how it had terrified him:

The mural, as I've said, catalysed both terror and intrigue, haunting me still. To test my courage, I once revisited it. I was an adult by then and felt I needed to defy its immense power, unlock its mystique, try to break its hold.

He goes on to describe this return and to describe the mural. It fascinates him, and he wants to see how it had been created and who created it. This leads him to find out more about the creator, Mervyn Napier Waller, and he begins to give an account of Waller's life.

The mural does exist, and Waller did, too. He was an artist whose work is well represented in churches and in public buildings in Melbourne. His achievements in art, and especially in the creation of stained-glass windows, were remarkable, since he had taught himself to work with his left hand after his right arm was blown off in 1916 when he served as a bombardier with the Australian Imperial Force in France.

Our criminal narrator has clearly researched Waller's life thoroughly, and he mentions media reports, recordings, and art that can be easily found on the Internet. At the same time, he recalls his own visit to Ravenna and the mosaics that Waller, too, had once seen there. He remembers the pensione in which he stayed, and his curious description its owner, Francesca, is typical of the colorful way in which he describes others:

She limped as she crossed the hall to advance up the staircase. I appeared to be watching a galleon with azure sails pitching in heavy swells. Her face gave away everything that needed to be said on her behalf, a visage tanned and oval, her eyes brown, bright, and supertitled with dark brows that contrasted sharply with a precise halo of meringue-white hair.

Francesca complains about the town being covered in graffiti—all supposed to be art. "We are suffering from a pandemic," says Francesca. "Young people talk only in pictures. No longer words, dottore. They no longer read and write in words." She complains that even instructions for assembling furniture come as cartoon-like pictures:

It seems to me, she said in a measured way, forgoing bluster, that the evolution of communications is towards murals. We are returning to the first way humans used to tell their fellows what they thought they needed to know.

Our narrator's memories of people are vivid but perhaps unreliable, and he clearly likes a good story. At the Basilica di San Vitale in Ravenna, where "Hades the god of the underworld is depicted" riding behind Death, he claims to have met a woman who appeared very distressed by these mosaics. The story she tells him, and which he recounts for Dr Reynolds, is strange and fascinating. Her husband, she says, had been terrified by these images and had, many times, told her never to visit them. He had come to believe their small village was being attacked by Ankou. Ankou, as Wikipedia informs us, are otherworldly creatures, servants of death, whose existence as skeletal figures in black robes is recorded in "Breton, Cornish, Welsh and Norman French folklore." This woman's husband believed their threatening existence would destroy their village and its people. The nearby Carnac Stones (pictured in this books" endpapers), thousands of granite boulders, some "bigger than American refrigerators" were being moved. "A whole army of Ankou" were doing this, and he had measured these movements obsessively. He also believed the village charcutiere's wife was an Ankou. His beliefs drove him to a strange kind of madness and eventually to murder and suicide. "It worried me. She worried me, and I felt huge sympathy for her, Dr Reynolds," says our narrator. "Enormous. You might not believe it but you should."

Other stories, some provably factual, others possibly imagined by a man who, as he readily admits, has committed some terrible crime, are equally detailed, and his responses to them are complex. He is clearly elderly. He writes of the marble games he and his friends used to play, remembering the names of the different games and the various marbles—the "alleys"; and he recalls his brief time as a temporary ranger in State national parks, employed along with other 19- and 20-year-old university students, to maintain the park rules. Inadequately trained and equipped, they were stationed alone in remote areas and expected to "deter those inclined to litter and to shoot koalas with crossbows." His own encounter with a sexual predator at an isolated beach is terrifying, and his response to this man potentially deadly.

From his writings, it is clear the narrator is educated, well-travelled, well-read, and intellectually able, but he is in a mental hospital. At one point he breaks off his narrative:

"Hélas, a burly nurse approaches with my medication. I'll continue later. After I get rid of the pills.

Hélas, hélas, mon lizard est mort.

Getting rid of the pills was maybe not the best thing to do. At the end of his record, his mental state is deteriorating. "Big Mick," "Zoltan" and "Nurse Molly" (he calls her "Wretched Ratched," after Ken Kesey's terrifying nurse in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest) are in charge and about to confiscate his laptop. His thoughts and actions become more erratic and deranged, but he is still able to challenge Dr Reynolds before they hold him down and inject him full of tranquilizers:

"What do you make of all this? Dr Reynolds. You're the mind man. Has writing down my thoughts been worthwhile? The experiment? Do I make sense? Who cares? I don't. No one will read it."

Well, it is worth reading, if only for the bizarre—and historical—stories he tells, and tells well; and for his unusual, often thought-provoking, reflections on life and death. He never does reveal exactly what his crimes have been, but the stories he chooses to tell leave the reader, like Dr Reynolds, with the puzzle of his nature and his possible motives for violence.