Poverty of words?

Subliminal insistence

What Fear Was

by Ben Walter

Review by Nic Margan

Readers of Australia’s major literary journals are likely to be familiar with Ben Walter’s stories, recognisable by their musical sentences, vivid descriptions of the Tasmanian bush and narratives where dread and longing often creep. Perhaps more continuous still is the subliminal insistence in Walter’s work that stories should bend and fizz and leap more often than they do. They seem averse to storytelling that covers and re-covers old ground, insistent that literature needs authors to be brave enough to ask readers to stretch a little more. What Fear Was represents a great achievement in this sense – the publication of a collection of stories that take risks is uncommon, but important. Walter displays impressive formal range – here gothic and there comic, dipping variously into postmodernism and magic realism, but always writing in his distinctive style, which rings as true as a fine bell. The best stories are riveting and will be reread in this household. Propelled by original turns of phrase, vivid details and tight narrative structure, Walter’s prose glistens and rears upright, undeniably vital. These stories carry you physically and emotionally to foreign places and make them suddenly familiar. At times, they read as lyrically as long poems – using language more like a musician than a mathematician. Everything non-human can be alive with intent and meaning. The narrative turns left unexpectedly. The vitality of characters is established in neat, economical sentences. Geology is described as a way of measuring tension in loping hills, frost is a tide of aching, economic collapse looks like newspapers circulated with nothing printed on them. There is much to love. This is a collection that rewards attentive reading, but some stories may appear overly cryptic. This is not necessarily a faltering. The resistance of the text may encourage the kind of active, lateral reading that the author is interested in. This isn’t a book for reading in the drowsy moments before sleep, nor would it suit lolling about in the sun on holiday. Its twenty-two stories are short and rich. They are better read like espresso in the morning or, as would suit the author, taken on a hike to be handed around and discussed.

The collection’s subject matter is varied but always handled adeptly. The text works not in straight lines but by circling back to put a new shade on lingering forms – bushwalking, grief, fear, relationships, environmental events and human settlement – to accumulate compelling themes. The boundaries between human action and natural forces blur and one is inseparable from the other. The built and natural environment are no blank slate on which grief or division are experienced – they are an active part of experience and meaning. Apocalyptic moments of fire, water and pestilence elevate this to a religious pitch. There is a nod, in this, to the older Australian literary tradition of the tyranny of the bush, and yet (as is appropriate for a contemporary take) that outlook is reframed as a social response. And then, quite gracefully, the inherent drama of a meaningful landscape is sometimes leavened by a comic moment. But many of the stories are quite dark. The title story is among the best and one that manages to simultaneously compel and ask something of the reader. Depicting the terror of bushfire, it consists of only three sentences and two of those are immense, stretching things, where dialogue and action and setting lap against one another in a

breathless panic. Between these two stands the third, much shorter sentence, a moment of dreadful clarity: ‘A great pillar of smoke in the south-west.’ The only flaw of this piece is that it ends so soon. If there is a story that holds the diverse styles and subjects of the collection together it is ‘Landscapes Within Landscapes’. Here a meek author (simply named ‘the useless man’) goes to be judged on his attempts at writing about the landscape by three incarnations of it. The author has a view to eternity, but not the kind set in statues on city streets, but the kind that the landscape itself embodies – everchanging and yet continuous – which he might participate in through a writing harmonic with it. The story displays the sense that an attempt to capture the sublime of the natural world is an act of impertinence (like a butterfly in a jar) and, simultaneously, elocutes the ability of the natural world, even (and perhaps especially) in its harshest moments to present a Siddhartha moment. This is brief; the judges and the moment are washed away by weather, a force of nature apparently only voiceless for lack of a wider lens. In this sequence, the awareness of what Walter elsewhere describes as ‘the poverty of words’ is acknowledged, dispelled, and then bowed to. The bickering of the judges is transcended by the interceding rain. Walter’s useless man is no more useful, but wiser. In doing so, he proves the very wealth of words.

Puncher & Wattmann / RRP $29.95 / 176pp