Takolander’s previous work includes the poetry collection Ghostly Subjects (2009). She also teaches literary studies and creative writing at Deakin University and has published a scholarly book about magic realism, Catching Butterflies (2007). Literary and scholarly matters swirl through the stories in The Double: there are people writing or studying poetry, or reflecting (with trepidation) upon its future; there are people writing PhDs on such things as ‘the intersections of feminism and post-colonialism in African literature’, and there are schoolchildren studying King Oedipus.

But Takolander is not merely describing her vocational world. Rather, her stories seem like wordscapes that offer panoramic views without shunning fine, sometimes devastating, details. They reverberate with the passage of time, especially those stories that link Australia to northern Europe, to Stalinism. A weary sadness seems to wash over many of the characters; they look deep inside themselves without necessarily finding resolution or sustenance. Takolander’s prose has a quite gorgeous directness, a desert-like sparseness, even when – no, especially when – the topic is melancholy or fearsome. These qualities are also evident in poems such as ‘Finland: Fables’ from Ghostly Subjects:

In a kitchen there was a man who drank the worlds contained in
bottles, but who could never find the strangers he had killed in
the war, whose blood had melted with the snow.

The Double has two distinct parts. Part I contains eight unrelated stories while Part II consists of four stories that revolve around a mysterious interpreter of poetry. The stories in Part I are distinctive because of the way Takolander draws together multiple strands – emotions, ideas, dissonance, events – and sits them together, delicately, in new and strange formations. 

For me, the standout story is ‘Mad Love’, in which a woman marries an older man. The woman narrates the story, addressing the man directly: ‘I generally tried not to dwell on your appearance’; ‘It seemed to me that you chose to know nothing of the world’; ‘I realised that deep down I had always hated you.’ The couple marry and honeymoon in Africa, the woman keen to see firsthand, and even keener for the man to recognise, the reality of war atrocities. It is a complex, tense, and visceral account – of the woman, the man, the two of them as a couple, the other tourists, and the tour operators.

Maria Takolander (photo by Nicholas Walton Healy)Another terrific story is ‘The War of the Worlds’, in which a mother worries about her relationship with her son. With admirable brevity and a blend of realism and the fantastic, Takolander sketches a world in which men fly off to fight a seemingly never-ending war for the planet Ares. What’s best about the story is not the imagined future – interesting though Takolander’s portrait of a crumbling city is – but the woman’s inner turmoil. She knows that she is losing her son, first to his military training and then to the skies, but resists with magnificent, futile doggedness.

Periodically, strands from within the stories sit slightly askew, one example being the climax to ‘The Interpretation of Dreams’, a layered portrait of a teenage boy out of sync with his world. Although there are no more than a handful of these moments, they seem prominent when they arise, perhaps because Takolander’s prose is so intricate and yet so simple.

The four stories in Part II of The Double revolve around Zed Roānkin – or, more correctly, around his tract A Roānkin Philosophy of Poetry. This pamphlet, which sits nestled in an odd spot on a library shelf, offers inspiration to some and wreaks havoc on others. The stories focus on an ardent follower of Roānkin; a lover of nature poetry who falls into an emotional and intellectual abyss after reading a poem inspired by Roānkin; and a young research assistant who falls in love with a rival of Roānkin’s who creates ‘epically sized poetry installations’. In the last – and best – of these stories, a librarian on the cusp of retirement makes everything clear.

The four Roānkin stories are intellectually rigorous, but they are also energetic and playful. Indeed, they are funnier than the stories in Part I, though a downbeat humour pervades the entire book. But in contrast to Part I, the characters here seem slightly more caricatured and coerced into the service of broader themes, and the scenarios seem more forced.

The two parts of The Double sit together a little awkwardly. Whereas the stories in Part I are perhaps ideally dipped into – a story here, a story there – the Roānkin stories resonate most fully if read, in effect, as chapters of a single work. This is hardly a major worry and doesn’t detract from the collection’s qualities, but The Double does resemble two books stitched together, tilting slightly.