Testostero by David Foster (1987)

This crystallised a few things for me. This one is based on the twinned ideas of heredity and identity, with a whole superstructure of other satirical stuff hanging ganglingly off them. It is this quality of being a 'novel of ideas' which finally made itself fully felt - no idea why it took so long, apart from the obvious one of dimness! I looked back over Foster's career to date, and how different he was, especially from ultra-current notions of what constitutes good writing, and had the schlock realisation that I was venturing through the works of a novelist of ideas, in a period when that notion was highly questionable, in fact almost forgotten. It had occurred before, but not truly crystallised, and its contrast to 'creative writing school'-ism and lush descriptivism was accentuated. The idea also made itself felt visually. These books, from North South West in 1973 right through to this one fourteen years later, should not have been produced in their gaudy, colourful Macmillan and Penguin covers. What they needed was the 60s to 80s New Directions treatment - austere black and white covers like those that company gave to writers like John Hawkes and Raymond Queneau, with collagey or single magazine-cutout illustrations. Far from pigeonholing Foster, I think they'd have released him in many ways. The problem is also of course one of countered expectation - could Australia produce a novelist of that kind? Foster is proof that it could. Other than this shroud of painfully gained perspective, the story here is the same old thing. Revelling in his mindpower, and its capacity to mount idea upon idea, refracting them through one another, and have humour lace through the vertical and horizontal network. Irritation with what I can only describe as an overly indulgent attitude to Australianness - the belief that somehow the 'ocker'-ism, that he is no doubt satirising in part, also has some kind of mystical cut-through which lays waste all the silly puffed-upness of Europe and the old world. Though as the meat of this one is digested, that idea thankfully drops away quite a bit. It's the story of twins separated at birth by a dodgy psychologist wanting to study their differing development or not via nurture. One stays in Britain and becomes a cheerful gay aesthete professionally involved in daddy's psychological discipline. The other gets shipped to Sydney, to a job at the local pool at Marrickville, prevailing John Clarke-esque ockerism and an odd little bit of poetry on the side. This poetry gets him a visit to Venice on a Commonwealth Writer's Grant, where he encounters the astounding old world, stinky canals, dodgy officials and mafioso everywhere, and his brother, as yet unknown. Then follows endless permutation of identity (mistaken and otherwise), sex, politics, cultural satire - like a Bazza McKenzie odyssey updated to these terms. Interestingly, it ends with the slightly ludicrous (not that everyone isn't, of course) cultured English brother as an influential art critic in Sydney, which makes Robert Hughes come to mind. He always seemed to me to offer more than he delivered - I wonder if the satire of this is meant to the same end? The journey does get in the end so overlapped and underhinged that it almost falls into smithereens; the swaps, reswaps, upswaps and downswaps bundling through one another in chugging permutation. Yet another example of this author's supreme mental alacrity and resource, meshed into a design which veers dangerously close to collapsing, and still manages to cause the now expected niggle en route.