There is much ironic comment on the political and social mores of Australian society, as seen through the eyes of the chief protagonist, Peter Christensen, many cutting remarks as to the hypocrisy and can’t which characterises most areas of Australian life – but it is all too long, overstated, and loses a lot of its pungency by the tone of moral superiority and self-sympathy which Christensen adopts.

The novel describes, sometimes humorously but usually tediously Christensen’s childhood and growing to maturity. We first meet him driving north from Sydney to his “spawning grounds at 80 m.p.h. in a red Ford Capri G.T., his current status symbol and love” to visit his estranged wife Mary, and his three-year-old son, attempting some reconciliation but, more urgently, in the hope that Mary will spend the night with him.

It is hardly an auspicious introduction to our hero – phallic sports car and sexual frustration! Mary is bitter and antagonistic, the child rather boringly ‘cute’ with its childish mispronunciations and undisguised admiration for the long absent father. Mary rebuffs Peter who leaves her angrily and hurling such epithets as slut and lubra: he has noticed bruises inside her thighs, which I assume he takes for signs of sexual promiscuity. But Mary is only one of the many bitter, frustrated, man-hating women in the novel. Peter seems to attract them, as do his mates and colleagues.

Peter’s mother is possessive, nagging, unwilling to allow her son any personal freedom or self-identity. His first girlfriend at the university is a prissy little tease, offering herself in return for the promise of lifelong love and marriage and babies. Wilson constantly symbolises women in terms of the sea, and Peter’s reaction to them is akin to his response to the sea throughout adolescence and manhood, seeing it as fecund, alluring, destructive, annihilating, wanting to immerse himself but fearful of its powers. Of course this is a common male equation, but in this novel Wilson, I feel, carries it too far and it is in his descriptions of the sea that some of the more purple passages occur:

The waves kept on coming, obliquely to the rocks, like generations of schoolgirls, bending their lovely backs to love.
There was a crevice into which the waves channelled their energy and force, a blow-hole. The off-white foam frothed as a head of beer, and the ebb and flow of the fermenting broth trapped air with the familiar withdrawing, after-loving sound. (P-53)

Even the estimable Elizabeth, whom Peter meets and eventually marries after his divorce, makes it obvious from their first meeting that she is really only interested in his testicles and what they can produce. “Give me your seed, please give me your seed” she cries at their lovemaking; faintly ludicrous, perhaps, but he doesn’t anyway! One wonders whether after a couple of years of this liaison she too will be described in the quite repellent male patter which occurs earlier when Peter and his friend Chris are discussing marital sex:

“It’s just when you’ve been paddling in the same murky pond ...”
“You know every tussock. ”
“Precisely.”

For:

“These bloody women were all the same. They all get hysterical. They all want babies. The thought of another infertile month just sends them balmy! Another wasted egg! Another month towards menopause! Bloody nature, always tugging at the sleeve – ‘haven’t you done it yet?’  – pumping hormones into the blood. No wonder they say their hormones sometimes override their neurones!”

One could be generous and suppose that Wilson is satirising the insecurity and fear of the female which characterises so much of Australian male society, but nowhere in the novel is there an indication that Peter’s fears are depicted ironically. There’s not the loathing of women of the Mailers and Millers or the macho escapism of Hemingway; rather it’s a puerile little voice wanting to escape Mummy while hiding from the world under her apron.

Wilson does have a good ear for dialogue, especially between the mother and son, accurately depicting her frustration, her martyrish whine, Peter’s guilt and antagonism. The descriptions of New England where he goes to college are good and the very harshness of the tablelands denies Wilson the temptation to overwrite and symbolise which ruins the coastal descriptions. But throughout the novel there is a faintly undergraduate air, word plays and punning, which become trite and irritating. “She lived in B block (for birds) and he used to climb through the manhole in the ceiling to get into her manhole.”