The standard heading
of Reid’s Reader says that there will
sometimes be guest reviewers. Readers are welcome to e-mail me, or to contact
me with their e-mail address via this site, if they wish to submit a review of
a book new or old about which they want to inform the readers of Reid’s Reader.
This week, we present a review by a
guest reviewer. IAIN SHARP, poet, librarian, literary critic and convivial
person, reflects on a New Zealand novel which he thinks has been overlooked in
the rush to praise other things.
“THE TALKBACK MAN”
by David Ballantyne
(first published 1978)
Reviewed by IAIN SHARP
David Ballantyne (1924-1986) occupies a
peculiar slot in New Zealand literature. He’s the country’s most vigorously
championed unread author, the best publicised of our literary unknowns, our
most trumpeted obscurity. His 1968 novel Sydney
Bridge Upside Down has been lauded as a neglected masterpiece by local
literati, including Patrick Evans, C K Stead, Kate de Goldi, Gordon McLauchlan
and Hamish Clayton. Yet, in spite of such distinguished advocacy, readers at
large stubbornly continue to neglect the book. Perhaps young Harry Baird, the
novel’s untrustworthy narrator, is just too creepy and Ballantyne’s overall
vision is just too dark and disquieting to attain wide popularity and
Ballantyne is fated always to remain a writer’s writer.
Still,
his is such a singular talent I cannot forbear from adding my voice to the
hallelujah chorus, even if we’re singing to a smallish congregation.. Rather
than simply echo the existing praise for Sydney
Bridge Upside Down, however, I prefer to gesture towards the merits of one
of Ballantyne’s later novels, The
Talkback Man from 1978.
Bryan
Reid explains in his 2004 biography After
the Fireworks how Ballantyne became acquainted with Gordon Dryden in the
late 1940s when both were young reporters working for the now defunct
Wellington newspaper the Southern Cross.
Decades later, after both had moved to Auckland, they would often meet for a
drink in the Occidental Tavern in Vulcan Lane. In the early 1970s Dryden hosted
a three-hour talkback show named Powerline every morning, Monday to Friday, on
Radio I. Phil Rhodes, the protagonist of
Ballantyne’s novel, hosts a three-hour talkback show named Stir Line
every morning, Monday to Friday, on Radio Queen City. His job seems clearly
based on Dryden’s, just as his favourite watering hole, the fictional Bull’s
Head Tavern, seems inspired by the Occidental. But, as Reid rightly observes,
Ballantyne draws more elements from his own life than from Dryden’s when
sketching in Phil’s background.
Like
his creator, Rhodes is a skinny, sardonic, New Zealand-born career journalist
who has come back to Auckland after a stint in London. He once edited a
magazine called Astonishing Aspects
that gradually built into an encyclopedia for young readers, just as Ballantyne
once edited a similar encyclopedia-in-parts for children called Finding Out. He shares Ballantyne’s
alcoholic tendency, admiration for Irish-American author James T Farrell and
choice of Ponsonby as home. What’s more, Rhodes is, like Ballantyne, a
neglected novelist – the author of Driven,
a book he describes, not without bitterness, as “a minor critical success – a
total flop otherwise”.
At one point in The Talkback Man Rhodes
cautions the most literary-minded (and perhaps the most literal-minded) of his
one-night-stands, “Sorry, but you’re
confusing a novel’s hero with its author, aren’t you?” We, too, should heed the
warning, because Rhodes and Ballantyne are not one and the same. Ballantyne was
never involved in talkback radio. He was married to the same woman from 1949
until his death and had a son and a grandson. Rhodes is divorced, shamelessly
and compulsively promiscuous and apparently childless.
Yet
The Talkback Man is a book that not
only invites confusion between author and authorial invention but revels in it. In his London years, we discover,
Rhodes led a dual life, sometimes assuming the identity of the lead character
in Driven, the insalubriously named
Pete Crapshott. There are moments in The
Talkback Man that have a layered labyrinthine effect, luring the reader to
reflect on Ballantyne-as-Rhodes-as-Crapshott.
Complicating
matters still further, The Talkback Man is
not Rhodes’s first appearance in Ballantyne’s fiction. He’s one of the subsidiary characters in the 1966 novel A Friend of the Family. In the earlier
book we see him during his Astonishing
Aspects days, already drinking too much and already fond of assuming his
Crapshott persona. Even without recourse to his alias, Rhodes is a deeply
divided personality, by turns jovial and teasing, melancholy and aloof, in one
mood brimming with overly familiar bonhomie and, in the next, bristling with
arrogant hostility.
By
the time of The Talkback Man, Rhodes
has developed a smooth line of patter, but we wonder – as he himself sometimes
wonders – how much of his seasoned spiel he actually believes. His denigrators
accuse him of snideness and insincerity. He acknowledges that some of his
remarks come off sounding more sarcastic than intended – “a terrible
affliction”. But what then is his
intent? At one point he refers to himself as “an innocent”, which on first
blush seems an extraordinary claim to come from an incorrigible sexual predator
who gets a kick from cuckolding his cronies, but it’s at least half-true. His
child-like egotism and hunger for applause often blind him to the bigger
picture and make him vulnerable.
Although
The Talkback Man is not a
first-person narrative, like Sydney
Bridge Upside Down, from start to finish we stay with Rhodes’s point of
view. Early in the book we come to distrust his interpretation of events and to
be wary of the excuses he makes for his less than noble behaviour. He does not
have full confidence in himself either because he’s suffering increasingly from
alcoholic blackouts. We know that on one occasion that he later cannot remember
he has danced on the bar and made supercilious comments that offended
Polynesian acquaintances. But we’re not sure – and neither is he – of what
other crimes and misdemeanours he might be capable. There are hints that he
could even be a murderer.
Throughout
the novel he is pestered, while on air, by a crank caller who persists in
calling him Pete rather than Phil. This caller is privy to information from
Rhodes’s London past. He asks how Petula Walton, Rhodes’s pert young assistant
on Astonishing Aspects and a minor
character in A Friend of the Family,
really met her death. Did she jump or was she pushed? Meanwhile a shadowy
figure in a long gingery wig begins asking for Rhodes in Auckland pubs. Is this
the crank in disguise or someone unrelated?
Rhodes
comes to suspect that the caller is a disgruntled actor who is capable of
producing a wide range of male and female, adult and juvenile voices. This
leads to the unsettling question of how many calls to Stir Line might have been
faked. Rhodes prides himself of being able to provoke good talkback. But how
often have his provocative openers
been met with hoax responses from the master of mimicry who is his unknown
enemy? Is his old angst about insubstantiality behind adopted poses now running
riot?
Ballantyne
had an excellent ear for New Zealand speech rhythms. Part of the pleasure of The Talkback Man is the accuracy with
which he reproduces boozy Auckland banter, circa 1978. Yet just beneath the
book’s deceptively laidback, dialogue-driven, naturalistic Kiwi surface there’s
an unnerving Paul Auster-like cleverness. While sounding throughout as if he’s
just nattering with us over a shared jug of beer, Ballantyne gradually leads us
into maelstrom of ideas about illusions and delusions, authenticity and
posture, the reliance of personal identity on memory, what the Canadian
sociologist Erving Goffman memorably termed “the presentation of self in
everyday life” and how that presentation, however skilfully contrived, should
not be mistaken for the whole story.
Iain Sharp.
