Historical documents may enliven our understanding of the past but they also flatten it, leaving certain people – often those marginalised due to sexuality, gender, race – as blurred silhouettes on the fringes. In Jay Carmichael’s novel Marlo – set in Melbourne in the 1950s – he attempts a correction, breathing into sharper focus the gay men demonised and criminalised as “sexual perverts” in the annals of Australia’s past.
Carmichael’s popular debut, Ironbark, was shortlisted for 2016 Victorian premier’s unpublished manuscript award – and was so deftly written it made Christos Tsiolkas jealous. It was a cutting, artfully restrained tale of a young gay man coming of age in a small country town, enduring grief, a crisis of identity and unfulfilled desires. Similar themes populate the author’s second book, Marlo, which also centres a young gay man, Christopher, who has uprooted from the “quiet pastures” of regional Victoria for the bustle of the city.
Christopher is a reserved, solitary figure. His mother dead and father absent, he’s in search of belonging, though he finds Melbourne hostile: “a space that was not intended for me”. He knows there are people like him, men with similar hungers – he reads about them in the paper: “Turned in by an anonymous witness. Arrested by police. Charged with committing an act of gross indecency with each other.” In Marlo, faithful to Australia’s punitive past, homosexuality is not only illegal (in Victoria, anal sex was punishable by death until 1949; it remained a crime until 1981) but seen as a “gross indecency”, a medical anomaly, something abhorrent.
Despite this, Christopher remains perpetually searching. He is introduced to the city’s queer nooks and venturing into the gardens where men have sex in the shadows – while avoiding those who will arrest or beat them for it. But it is only upon his meeting Morgan, a gay Indigenous man, that he truly finds “a connection in an otherwise alien landscape”. They start a tentative relationship and Marlo’s focus – and enduring appeal – is the slackening and pulling taut of its tensions: of two men attempting to cleave for themselves a sense of safety and normalcy.
Marlo is framed by real historical material: court snippets and photographs populate the novel – albeit in a somewhat haphazard and dislocated manner. More subtle and affecting are the absences we’re guided to: history’s lacunae, records that never survived or perhaps went unwritten. When Christopher burns his amorous love letters to Morgan, fearing them evidence of sodomy, he laments that “the only words that remained” of their lives would be those of newspaper headlines. He rages against it: “the words, the ink – the heavy ink – coated my tongue, clouded my eyes like cataracts.”
Yet Carmichael does not allow his lovers to succumb to tragedy, trauma, death – motifs of the “bury your gays” trope of queer characters. (The trend predates even Marlo’s era, when prohibitions against glorifying homosexuality in literature forced writers to demonise or kill off their gay characters.) In his author’s note, Carmichael quotes Dennis Altman’s Homosexual, regarding how “most attempts to see homosexuality in a broader context have tended to reinforce social opprobrium and homosexual misery”. Christopher and Morgan face tribulations but they are not defined by or sacrificed to them.
Carmichael’s prose achieves a quality seemingly ordinary but desirable in fiction: it is recognisable. His restrained tempo feels like a sine wave – its pace oscillating, never dragging or rushing – while his imagery remains simple, clear: groups of people scattered on lawn “as if confetti”; a man’s seductive wink “a lure trawling deep water”. It’s a shame the author falters in his trust of the reader occasionally, over-explaining and denuding a sentence (when a character drags on a cigarette, for example, we’re told “closed eyes suggested equilibrium, while a lengthy exhale of white smoke conveyed pure relief”). It can feel at times like reading by numbers.
There is an air of hesitancy sometimes, too. Morgan’s experience as an Indigenous gay man is handled sensitively yet we learn little of his family, culture, country or language – as if Carmichael is wary of overstepping. The author does touch, lightly but effectively, on intersectional marginalities and the ignorance of white society via the naivety of his protagonist. One of Marlo’s more astute pieces of dialogue intertwines the ostensible romance of their first encounter with the reality of the racial power dynamics of the era. As Morgan explains to Christopher, an Indigenous man would not lightly refuse a white man’s interest: “I didn’t think I’d ever see you again, then you invited me on the train ride home – and, well, I couldn’t say no.”
Carmichael’s control and poetic timbre are Marlo’s strengths, and there’s doubtless influence here from the works of Tsiolkas and Patrick White. But compared with Ironbark, which stemmed so viscerally, and so poignantly, from memoir, the novel feels less grounded, thinner (quite literally: Marlo is a slim read). It is still affecting. Carmichael writes how there is no “holistic account of the lived experiences” of gay men in the 40s and 50s: “Such lives must largely be inferred.” Marlo, then, is a rebuke, disrupting archival stasis to bring alive two lovers – men who to history may have been mere statistics. It succeeds in this.
Marlo by Jay Carmichael is out now through Scribe
