Of course the first question to put to Alan Wearne is why, in 1986, write a novel using a series of long verse narratives? His answer, like most good answers, is short and to the point: ‘I always wanted to write a novel, but as I write poetry a verse novel seemed logical thing to do. It was really just an extension of what I had been doing before.’ Wearne also commented that the plot of sex, politics and drugs could easily have collapsed into a soap opera if he had attempted to write it in a conventional novel form.

Wearne was aware, during the nine years he worked on the book, of the uniqueness of much of The Nightmarkets. He points out the while the occasional verse novel has been writing in Australia, The Nightmarkets – both in its subject matter and its use of many different literary forms and structures – is very different from even the more contemporary Australian verse novels. 

But while there is a certain uniqueness in the book, Wearne also freely admits to the influence of nineteenth century  writers such as George Meredith: ‘They more or less showed me that it could be done, but they themselves belong to a long tradition of verse narratives in English stretching right back to Chaucer and beyond.’

There are indeed traces of both Meredith and Chaucer in The Nightmarkets. Wearne, for example, has utilised the 16-line Meredithian sonnet in all of Ian Metcalfe’s narratives, with the exception of the one which opens the novel. This opening narrative by Ian, however, contains a number of elements of the Prologue to The Canterbury Tales. Ian introduces a number of the main characters, explaining their relationship to each other and passing veiled judgements on some. He also provides some essential social and political background.

According to Wearne the first section was one of the last pieces of the novel to be written. ‘After I had finished the bulk of the book I had to finally work out some way of opening the narrative.’ Perhaps because Ian does introduce us to the main body of the novel, he does at times adopt the role of a conventional narrator. The opening narrative ends, for example, with Ian introducing the next narrative: ‘ ... But this far into my raving is quite enough. / Please meet my first lover, still my closest friend, Sue Dobson.’ Ian is, in fact, one of the characters who spent the seventies watching things drift away and, in his almost perpetually stoned state, it is perhaps inevitable that at times he talks with a somewhat artificial sense of detachment.

In many ways Ian and Sue are the pivots upon which the rest of The Nightmarkets revolves. They are the only two characters who are given more than a single narrative, Sue having two and Ian four. More importantly though, they also link together all the other narrators. Ian’s brother, Robert Metcalfe, an ALP candidate for the seat of O’Dowd, narrates a section of the novel set at an ALP Federal Conference in Adelaide. Sue Dobson has an affair with John McTaggart, ex-Liberal Party cabinet minister who resigned to establish the New Progress Party. Sue also comes across McTaggart’s mother, Elise, one-time matriarch of the women’s wing of the Liberal party, who looks back on thirty years of politics lived through a husband and a son.

McTaggart, in his search for ammunition to use against his political foes, hires Ian to investigate the death of a woman who worked at the Crystal Palace, an upmarket brothel. While Ian once broke a story in an alternative magazine which seriously damaged the state liberal government, it was a one-off story with the information coming through his brother’s contacts in the ALP. It quickly becomes obvious that Ian is not suited to undercover work, or even investigative journalism.

Interestingly, we learn almost as much about the characters from the structure of their narrative as we do from the details they reveal about themselves. Wearne admits to using the verse form at times to reflect the character of the person speaking.’ He singles out ‘lan’s outrageous rhymes’ and Robert’s formal, yet adventurous, verse structure’. McTaggart, the successful politician, delivers his narrative in prose because, according to Wearne, ‘prose is the language of party politics in Australia’.

One of the results of Wearne’s effective blending of content and form is that an individual portrait emerges of each person through the different narratives, so that in the end they come together like a jagged jigsaw puzzle.

It is impossible to talk about The Nightmarkets without commenting on the incredible detail which forms a backdrop to all the narratives. Weare went to great lengths to research these details. Being an unsuccessful ALP candidate for the 1979 state election himself meant that researching the ALP background to the novel was no problem. The Liberal party background of McTaggart was a different matter. Weare interviewed a number of figures in the Liberal Party, among them ex-cabinet minister Tony Staley and ex-Prime Minister John Gorton. Gorton was particularly important as far as McTaggart’s development was concerned because Wearne saw him as very much a Gorton protégé. By talking with Gorton about the McTaggart character, Wearne was able to get some idea of just what sort of person Gorton himself would have appointed to cabinet.

Wearne obviously set out to make The Nightmarkets a major work and, in the final instance, it would seem that he has succeeded. The book has so far attracted a degree of attention, mostly due to its ‘novelty’ value; for, as the back cover blurb says, ‘There has never been anything like it’. The Nightmarkets is, however, an adventurous and expansive work which will reward several readings. It deserves a readership much larger than the one it will probably receive.