REVIEW OF CAPE GRIMM
Reviewer: Dorothy Johnston
Canberra Times 14/02/04

The English novelist and mythographer Marina Warner has argued convincingly for the ability of fairy tales to acquire seven league boots in order to travel around the world, her argument being that essentially the same story, Cinderella for example, can be found in countries as far apart as Germany and China, and many places in between. Stories that travel in this way can bring delight to the people who receive them. They can also carry anguish. For the stories, as any teller of them knows, are far from neutral. They are certainly not innocent. They intersect with history, and with individual lives, which they have the capacity to alter profoundly.

    It is clear from the start that Cape Grimm , Carmel Bird ’s first literary novel since the Miles Franklin short-listed Red Shoes, is to be a mythic tale. ‘Once there was  fair country,’ the first chapter begins, ‘where the people lived in peace and prosperity until there came a time when a strange child appeared and the land was turned to dust, to dust and ashes.’

    By setting the novel in north-western Tasmania , Bird brilliantly combines a landscape and seascape that seem made for myth with a story of mass murder. The central event is a horrific one, the murder in 1992 of almost an entire religious community, 147 men, women and children, by their charismatic preacher and leader, Caleb Mean. The only two survivors, apart from Mean, are a young woman, Mean’s cousin and lover, Virginia, and their daughter Golden. The religious community dies willingly, first of all drugged, then burnt to death in the  Meeting Hall. Their religion has been one which revered the human imagination, and there is a seductive undertow throughout the story, enticing readers towards the imagination’s dark side. At the same time, the beauty of the community’s ‘ Temple of the Winds’, and the life of work and study is celebrated and mourned through Virginia ’s secret chronicle.

   The massacre and death by disease of the indigenous inhabitants are woven in, as are aspects of Tasmanian history that other writers have developed into a strong fictional tradition. But not until Cape Grimm have the various elements been brought so powerfully together.

    The narrator is a poet and professional psychiatrist – he gets to read the chronicles – who has spent years attempting to understand the tragedy, and the character of Caleb Mean. But the account Paul Van Loon offers is far from a scientific or medical report. It is the narrative of someone who knew Mean as a child, and whose story becomes inextricably linked with that of his subject’s.

    The Van Loons emigrated to Tasmania after the Second World War, and, in Paul Van Loon’s childhood memories, the family is set apart from older, more settled inhabitants, and teased, as immigrants are, about their food and clothing. Van Loon’s record draws inevitably on his own childhood, offering some of the novel’s most striking and enduring images, including Mean the child preacher in a white suit with silver lapels ‘like a little band leader’, and a scene on a merry-go-round where the boy rides a white horse in an ecstatic trance.

    Van Loon feels a certain sympathy for Mean, who clearly never had anything like a normal childhood. ‘I have wanted to know what made him tick for a long long time. I never will, but I can try. He was treated by his family as if he was the South American version of the Holy Child, the Infant Jesus who sits up on his throne, wearing a pink silk dress and covered in cockle shells. He sometimes used to wear a straw hat with shells on it; a pilgrim’s hat, a replica of the hat on El Nino de Atocha.’

     ‘One of the key ideas in the novel is that of home – homelessness – migration,’ says Carmel Bird , who was born in Launceston. Moonbirds, also called muttonbirds or shearwaters, make a number of appearances. ‘In the whole array of living things there is only one terrestrial order that is homeless and alien to any land. That creature is the moonbird.’ Giant squids emerge several times as well, whether washed up on the beach in the novel’s present time, or taking advantage of past storms and shipwrecks. There is a constant pull through and underneath the narrative, away from the social world, and the world of readily understandable occurrences, towards one which is much more frightening and strange.

     One of the community’s founding ancestors was born in Peru , the survivor of an 1851 shipwreck in Bass Strait . She married the only other adult survivor, Magnus Mean, from the Isle of Skye . It is Minerva Mean’s Peruvian heritage that links the Christ Child El Nino, Caleb Mean as the boy chosen to lead his people, and the weather events called El Nino, facets of which are dramatically described in the novel. The linking of past and present, of legendary events with contemporary ones, so that they form a whole, is one of the most original and daring aspects of the novel. Many lost and homeless voices are recorded, perhaps the most poignant issuing from a contemporary tragedy, in the voice of a child who drowned with the SIEV-X sank off Christmas Island in 2001, and three hundred and fifty people drowned. ‘If I die in the sea,’ one of the children on board says to her father, ‘don’t leave me here alone.’

    Fate decides who drowns and who is saved in Cape Grimm . A baby is miraculously saved from a shipwreck. A woman and child are saved from the Skye massacre. Though Mean intends the woman, as his chosen partner, to ride her horse off the edge of a cliff alongside him, this doesn’t happen. Virginia and her daughter survive, recover, play their own part in Van Loon’s personal odyssey. Bird’s prose style delights in coincidences and conundrums, in the playful and dangerous blend of fact and fiction. She is not afraid of spinning out the many glittering facets of a theme. One last plus – the cover is a beauty.