Reviewed by Rod McLary
The basic premise for this novel is a rather daunting one. D – his full name is never revealed – is a psychopath held in a secure facility for crimes which also are never revealed. He has been asked by his psychiatrist to write down his thoughts, admissions and uncertainties. What follows is a tour-de-force of literary fiction as D traverses through other people’s lives and conflates fact and fiction.
The epigraph to Mural is a quote from the Austrian writer Thomas Bernard: Parents make a child and strive above all else to destroy it. Bernard is considered to be one of the most important German language authors of the post-war period. In his novels, he explored themes of death, isolation, illness and obsession – all themes which are similarly explored in Mural. Bernard also blended fact and fiction with protagonists on the verge of insanity. Again, these appear in this work but with a freshness and imaginative flourish which takes Mural into new territory with the ‘assorted and equivalent methods’ of metaphorically destroying children resonating through the novel.
D’s justification for his writing is to set out for Dr Reynolds ‘the things which leap into [his] bedlam of a mind’, ‘unpredictable [and] chaotic’ [3]. And he begins his writing – in the first person and addressed to Dr Reynolds – with the story of Harry Ellis arriving at Circular Quay in 1875 and aged just sixteen. It is through the story of Harry Ellis that we learn more about D and what provoked his crimes as he says he can best explain it ‘through the prism of someone else’s revelations’ [7].
Ellis – with a reference to Percy Bysshe Shelley’s poem The Flower That Smiles Today which reflects the poet’s pessimistic view of life – sexually responds to a ten-year-old girl in ways which he finds both ‘daring’ and ‘incomprehensible’ [26] presaging his later name-changing to become the Dr Havelock Ellis who studied human sexuality. Much of the history of Harry Ellis in Mural is consistent with the history of Havelock Ellis. And this gives the novel one of its strengths in that fact and fiction are seamlessly woven together and it is through the factual elements that we begin to comprehend D’s psyche and by extension what shaped it.
Then D takes the narrative in a different direction by exploring the life and works of [Mervyn] Napier Waller an Australian mosaicist and muralist some of whose works can be found in the Australian War Museum. In an attempt to ‘excuse his perversions’, D recalls a Waller mural at the back of the church which D and his family attended and which for D ‘catalysed both terror and intrigue’ [83]. Again, an amalgam of fact and fiction leading back to the author’s theme – how parents destroy their children.
Perhaps though the most chilling section – and one which presages the crimes which D is yet to commit – is where D aged about nineteen becomes a temporary ranger in a state park. As D tells us ‘My violent episodes were yet to come … well, almost’ [173]. One morning, weeks into his time as a ranger, a stranger appears at D’s tent goading him to get out of his sleeping bag. D arises in a rage and throws a tomahawk at the man’s head and just misses. ‘What went through my head next was a desire to chop him into small pieces there and then’ [189]. There is then an ominous pause in D’s writings and he begins a slow decline into madness and incoherency.
Stephen Downes has crafted a novel which is breath-taking in its wide-ranging and erudite ramble through the mind of a psychopath who is intelligent, widely-read and articulate. But like a dangerous undercurrent in the ocean, D’s writings mask madness and a depth of violence which only break the surface as the narrative nears its conclusion.
Mural is a powerful and compelling novel which will remain with the reader long after the last page is turned.
Mural
[2024]
By Stephen Downes
Transit Lounge Publishing
ISBN 978 192302 318 5
$32.99; 200pp