However, though a sense of place is graphically present throughout the novel, there is very little reference to time. For instance, the reader does not know how long the Australians’ tour lasts, how long they spend in each location, or how closely two events follow each other. The effect is, I think, deliberate, and eerie. There is comfort in being able to say of an event ‘this will be awful, but it will be over by 5pm on Thursday’. No such security exists for the thirteen Australians and their attendant reader, who find themselves embarked on events that arc macabre, or alarming, or ludicrous, and which, although consecutive, are never historical.

Two qualities are shared by all the Australians, their gameness and their almost complete obliviousness of the horror through which they tour. Otherwise they are representative of many types, be it the kittenish, intellectually incurious man-catcher, Sasha, the bruised, cynical, hedonistic Violet, the outwardly shy Shiela from whose misery is growing a powerful and morbid demon; these are the single women of the party. The single men comprise Garry Atlas, boorish, puerile, yet given to the odd clumsy gesture of generosity, the zoologist Phillip North, with his active if desiccating curiosity and subtle aloofness, the indeterminate Gerald, and Borelli, the only one of the thirteen capable of at least some rudimentary moral action. There are three married couples, the mediocre Cathcarts, the Kaddoks, he a humorless encyclopedist, she loud and desensitised, and lastly Hoffmann, a dentist with the temperament of a gauleiter, with his tyrannised wife, Louisa, hiding her misery and not yet brutalised by it. As their itinerary progresses, so relationships begin; Sasha homes upon a bemused Phillip North, Borelli and Louisa are mutually attracted, Hoffmann corners Violet, while Garry Altas fumbles a relationship with Shiela. One further character that intrudes from time to time, an F.J. Hammersley, describes himself as ‘mainly public relations’ and is in fact an international graffitist who sabotages the exhibits in museums with promotional messages about Australia.

One of the most interesting technical accomplishments in the novel is that it manages without a hero. Not only are there thirteen characters who receive nearly equal treatment, but all of them are ‘on stage’ most of the time. Thus, though some of them, Shiela, for instance, or finally the immature Garry Atlas, elicit strong sympathy, there is no one character with whom the reader can identify and on whom he can focus as the book’s centre of gravity. The psychology of the characters is often revealed in sharp little interchanges, but it is never given extended scrutiny. The novel’s focus is a society of characters, properly so, for reasons I shall give presently.

There is a cartoon element in the characterisation of the Australians. I do not mean this slightingly, for the effect is to show how often cartoon characters more truly represent human behavior than more resonant portraits. Garry Atlas and the Cathcarts come to life because of the Bazza Mackenzie-like Australianisms they utter; the immaturity of their responses could be dramatised no better way, except that what is hilarious in the cartoon-strip is amusing and poignant in the life of the novel.

There is a further way in which cartoon techniques are employed in this novel, and that is the way in which conditions of contrived extremity are imitated from. particularly, cartoon films. A man with a penchant for ‘stripes’ in paintings who is forced to fight for his life against a gargantuan stars-and-stripes flag that has come adrift from a New York building belongs to the hilarious extremities of a cartoon film, yet this is exactly what happens to the brutal Hoffmann. and the fact that he becomes the victim of the tyrannising New York police and an object of contempt to the pavement crowd as a result is an appropriate nemesis for a tyrant-husband. It is also an incident of considerable moral perception about the arbitrary reversals of brute strength. Again, in another episode involving Hoffmann, the technique achieves an effect of scathing irony when he first approaches Violet. They are on the Statue of Liberty as around her waist his grip tightened’. The title of the novel points to one pre­occupation throughout its length. In the course of their encounters with objects and countries the feelings of homesickness in each character occur in various ways – compulsive postcard writing, aggressiveness (particularly against a justly aggrieved Soviet official) and its inversion into apology, which is how the ‘educated’, Gerald, North, and Louisa cope with it. However, the expressions of homesickness seem to point, not to an affection for a home­country, as to a neurosis about origins. Take for instance this exchange with their Russian guide, Anna.

Violet suddenly turned and smiled tightly. ‘You never ask us about our country. Aren’t you interested?’

‘Ah, yes. You have told me. And I have your passports –’

She smiled.

‘They’re not interested,’ Hoffmann shook his head. Everyone’s got to understand that.’

Anna smoothed her skirt. ‘We don’t travel as much as you.’

‘Because you can’t!’ Hoffmann again …

Why can’t you travel?’ Hoffmann asked. ‘Why don’t you tell us that?’

‘... We have no need,’ said Anna. ‘Oh, I would like one day to go to Egypt.’

‘Egypt’! Garry yelled.

‘Anna remained smiling. ‘You can take trips all your life, but there’s always death. Don’t you think?’ …

‘We come from a country,’ Louisa turned to Anna, ‘of nothing really or at least nothing substantial yet. We can appear quite heartless at times. I don’t know why. We sometimes don’t know any better.’ All smiles to help Anna. ‘Even before we travel we’re wandering in circles. There isn’t much we understand. I should say, there isn’t much we believe in. We have rather empty feelings ... I don’t know why we expect all answers to be simple, but we do ... In some ways in your country you are lucky.’ Louisa slowly flushed, noticing everyone looking at her.

Sitting away from her, Hoffmann snorted.

‘Speech! Speech!’ Garry banged; a form of reduction ...

‘We are an odd lot,’ admitted North, and suddenly began laughing.

Despite its deprecation, Louisa’s speech here is a remarkably accurate assessment of their tour, and the personalities of those comprising it. It is a form of nakedness that affronts and alarms the other Australians (except Borelli) and despite the subtle and unsubtle ways in which it is undermined, her honesty remains one of the very few gleams of human worth that exist in the novel. For the most powerful preoccupation in the novel is a global one, namely the desolation of modern life, and all details of character, incident and setting serve this theme. In a life spent gawping at mundane objects preserved in museums, or deriving thrills from witnessing human cruelty, deformity or unusualness, a hero in the novel would be anomalous and distracting, because his one-ness would restore the possibility of integration that the cram of objects, bizarre events and sensations has destroyed. This cram of events renders all the characters largely quiescent. They initiate very little of the action, other than those relationships that spring up among themselves. The one exception to this is a moment at the height of the gang-rape when Borelli defies the hulking tour­leader and switches off the light so they can see no more of it. Whether this action was prompted by vestigial decency, or funk is not utterly clear, though the former is most likely.

One further feature of the novel deserves mention, and that is the author’s Gunter Grass-like virtuosity for digression. Intruding upon the narrative are a history of the aerogramme, a dissertation on the importance of the human leg in human history, an assessment of jetlag, and other equally random passages. As well as being a source of humor and grotesquerie, they serve to further deflect attention from the human to the material, reinforcing the sense of information saturation that is so much a part of travel experience.

The artistry of Homesickness is unfaltering. The manners of Australian travellers are minutely observed, the succession of events is planned with wit and ingenuity. The moral underpinning of each character’s responses is invariably comprehended. The picture of human corruption and desolation that results is utterly credible, and if the reader wants solace, it must be largely found outside the confines of this fine and moving novel.

It is quite fortuitous that I am reviewing Monkeys in the Dark by Blanche D’Alpuget at the same time as Homesickness, for there is no resemblance between the two books.

The novel is set in Djarkarta shortly after the coup of 1965 has been crushed, and concerns the relationships that a young Australian journalist has with an Indonesian poet and with her secret agent cousin. Her milieu is the circle of diplomats and wealthy Indonesians. There are scenes of violence, danger, sexual perversion, personal betrayal, conspiracy and heartbreak. The steamy corruption of Djarkarta and the moral depravity of Embassy life are created colorfully, indeed overdone in passages. As light entertainment the book, if not compulsive reading, is not unsuccessful.

My criticism of the book is this, that the author, in common with other journalist/novelists I’ve reviewed on these pages, manages to be observant without being perceptive. This is the vice of seizing details, say of personality of local color, without carefully unearthing the roots that will allow it to live in the world of a novel alongside other details. For instance, it is quite believable that an Australian diplomat can be an unhappily married pederastras Blanche D’Alpuget’s Thornton Ashby is, but how is Thornton Ashby explainable, how are his perversions and unhappiness complete, rather than merely attributes assigned to him like luggage labels?

Thus, although the story is credible enough, although a more or less authentic atmosphere is re-created, the novel does not present that utterly enclosed and self­explanatory world that Homesickness, for instance, does present, and which is surely vital if a novel is going to enchant its reader.