A few hours ago, when I began to read Paul Carter’s second book, Living in a New Country, I remembered some of the occasions when Paul Carter talked to me about the space and landscape and art and England and Italy and Australia. I used to struggle to grasp his arguments and claims, but I used to suppose that I would understand these better if I could read them as writing. Yet when Paul Carter’s first book, The Road to Botany Bay, was published, I found I could read only a few pages at a sitting. Some passages so irritated me that I rewrote them in plain language. I decided that the book was much longer than it should have been, and I failed to finish it.

Living in a New Country is an assortment of nine pieces of writing. According to the Acknowledgments page, five of the pieces have been published previously. Certain passages in the Introduction seem meant to justify the format of the book. For example: ‘To cobble together a personality it may be necessary to accept the many voices repeating in one’s head, to acknowledge that outside the context of their utterance one’s opinions have very little value at all. So with writing in this situation: to salvage a thesis it will be necessary to abandon the linear narrative, to embrace a variety of voices.’ This is a fair sample of the writing in the Introduction. I suspect that this sort of prose is no worse than I might find in any other recently published book or essay about what are called ideas or issues, but I protest that such writing is wordy and unclear.

The author of the passage quoted seems to be saying that the writer of a book such as his has the task of salvaging a thesis. Or, is the passage an instruction to the reader? This itself is confusing, but the figurative salvage adds to the confusion. If a thesis is to be salvaged, then that thesis must first have been marred or destroyed. But the salvaging of the thesis in this situation (whatever this situation might be) is going to be achieved not by the writer’s (or reader’s) dredging beneath the surface of something or poking about in the ruins of something. The salvaging is to be achieved by the writer’s (or reader’s) abandoning something. The writer (or reader) is going to abandon the linear narrative.

The so-called linear narrative is the straw man of the writer who wants to seem an innovator. Twenty years ago, Frank Moorhouse was said to have abandoned the linear narrative in his fiction. I have been reading seriously for nearly forty years, but I have still not read anything that I would call a linear narrative. Writers who announce that they have rejected the linear narrative seem to think of it as a primitive specimen from an earlier period in the evolution of writing. I went just now to the oldest piece of writing on my bookshelves: the book of Genesis. I read the first few verses in order to reassure myself. I have still not read any narrative that deserves to be called linear. Every narrative is a selection from near or far or up or down or sideways in the mind of the narrator. How easy narration would be if the narrator had only to follow a line.

According to the quoted passage, the writer (or reader) who abandons the linear narrative does so by embracing a variety of voices. Even if a variety of voices and a linear narrative were mutually exclusive, I cannot imagine how any writer (or reader) could embrace even one voice, let alone a variety.

The first sentence of the passage quoted seems meant to make clearer the rest of the passage. The writer (or reader) who salvages a thesis or embraces voices does these things in the same way that he or she might cobble together a personality. The verb to cobble has become fashionable among journalists in recent years, but it fails here to suggest any human activity that I can imagine. Nor do I learn any more about the cobbling of a personality when I read that it might be accomplished by accepting voices in the head.

And I cannot understand how the decision whether or not to accept the voices in one’s head has anything to do with the value of one’s opinions, in or out of their context. The phrases of their utterance and at all are padding, as is the adverb very.

I suspect that the quoted passage and the rest of the Introduction are the author’s way of saying ‘Even though I wrote some of these pieces to stand alone, they all belong in the book’. Yet why should he have had to say even that? The pieces are in the book, after all. From the moment when I first looked at the Contents page, I assumed that the author and the publisher believed the various pieces belonged together. And even if I had not so assumed, I would have preferred to read the pieces themselves rather than an Introduction full of tangled prose and mixed metaphors.

The Introduction is, I admit, the least readable part of the book, but passages of bad writing occur elsewhere. Here is a sentence from a page that I opened at random: ‘To unearth what has not been seen before and to reveal its invisibility, its spatial contingency, its relationship to the finder: this is the paradoxical quality to be found in the work of both artists.’ A quality cannot be paradoxical. The author surely meant to write: ‘… this, paradoxically, is the quality …’ But this is not the chief fault of the passage. How can a quality, a thing denoted by a noun, be defined by a verb or verbs, as the author here defines it? According to the quoted passage, the question ‘What quality is to be found in the work of both artists?’ is answered by the statement ‘To unearth … and to reveal …’

Some reviewers, impressed by the many complex sentences and the many abstract nouns, may call this an important book. The writing is too wordy and too strained for me to consider the book as a whole important, but I found passages and two whole sections that impressed me. As I write this, already more than a week after having read the piece ‘Making Contact’, I have in mind the old man who shouldered, presented and grounded a short stick while he and others of his tribe watched an exercise put on for their benefit by a party of marines from the Investigator. The passage that caused this image to lodge itself in my mind is from Matthew Flinders and not from Paul Carter, but to be fair to the author of ‘Making Contact’ I should add that not only the image of the black man imitating the marines in their red and white has stayed with me. Paul Carter’s argument as to the possible meaning of the act of mimicry made sense to me while I read it, and parts of it have stayed with me.

The whole sections that I liked are ‘Grass Houses’ and ‘Towards a Sound Photography’. I had read each before, but I was pleased to find again, in a rather arid and unappealing book, these examples of Paul Carter’s unforced thoughts and feelings.