FICTION
The Last Man in Europe
DENNIS GLOVER
BLACK INC., $29.99
![Barn Mill, where George Orwell wrote his dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty Four.](http://web.archive.org./web/20170717131303im_/https://www.fairfaxstatic.com.au/content/dam/images/g/x/6/2/9/f/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.gx62el.png/1500011020429.jpg)
The Pacific Room
MICHAEL FITZGERALD
TRANSIT LOUNGE, $29.95
A Talent for Murder
ANDREW WILSON
SIMON & SCHUSTER, $35
![George Orwell's dystopic novel changed after the first edition but it remains unclear whether the author himself was ...](http://web.archive.org./web/20170717131303im_/https://www.fairfaxstatic.com.au/content/dam/images/g/x/0/0/p/u/image.related.articleLeadNarrow.300x0.gx62el.png/1500011020429.jpg)
It is hard enough for literary biographers to persuade us of the vital connections between the usually uneventful, if sometimes sordid lives of authors and the triumphs of their art. For novelists, the task is different and the imaginative trespass is greater. Necessarily they feel free to make of their subjects more than we might have expected, or suspected.
This is what Colm Toibin did in his long reckoning with Henry James in The Master, a work that perhaps ended where it had not intended to, as a strange sort of homage. Now three other writers have been given a fresh, fictional life: Robert Louis Stevenson, in Michael Fitzgerald's first novel, The Pacific Room; Agatha Christie in Andrew Wilson's A Talent for Murder, and George Orwell in another debut, The Last Man in Europe, by Dennis Glover.
Stevenson and Orwell were tubercular and died in their 40s. Fitzgerald and Glover depict the slow ruin of their bodies, demystifying a disease that once was thought to be congruent with the artistic temperament.
Stevenson was the son of a prosperous Scottish lawyer who refused to follow his father's profession; succeeded as a writer and ended his days in Samoa. "Here I lie where I long to be," as his sanguine epitaph says. Christie came from an upper-middle class family and married a colonel of the Great War. Neither proved reliable supports. In common with Stevenson and Orwell, she learned to live by her wits.
![The Pacific Room by Michael Fitzgerald.](http://web.archive.org./web/20170717131303im_/https://www.fairfaxstatic.com.au/content/dam/images/g/x/6/2/s/s/image.related.articleLeadNarrow.300x0.gx62el.png/1500011020429.jpg)
While Orwell may have been "down and out in London and Paris", he went to school at Eton (subject of arresting vignettes by Glover) and served the colonial government in Burma. Of these three only his life had the stuff of adventure, when he fought and was wounded in the Spanish Civil War. The most dramatic event in Christie's life is a blank: her 10 days' disappearance in the winter of 1926. This is where Wilson begins.
He was preceded, last year, by the Australian novelist Kirsten Thornell's On the Blue Train, whose focus was also the novelist's response to her husband's infidelity that led to her holing up in a hotel in the northern spa town of Harrogate. Were her motives revenge, so simply time for herself? Thornell (whose title comes from the novel that Christie was struggling to finish), speculated soberly. Wilson's explanation exchanges mystery for melodrama.
![A Talent for Murder by Andrew Wilson.](http://web.archive.org./web/20170717131303im_/https://www.fairfaxstatic.com.au/content/dam/images/g/x/6/2/u/7/image.related.articleLeadNarrow.300x0.gx62el.png/1500011020429.jpg)
Christie is blackmailed by the sinister and halitotic Doctor Kurs. Adultery will be revealed and Christie's daughter harmed unless she agrees to use her skills as a writer of crime fiction actually to dispatch Kurs' wife Flora. (He wants her money). The latter is no hapless victim, and together with the young an overly inquisitive civil servant Una Crowe, she is one of the fully realised characters in Wilson's novel.
British intelligence becomes interested in the case (which suits Wilson's longer game – see below) and there is also a leaden subplot involving Superintendent William Kenward who believed that Christie had been murdered and did not long survive her re-emergence. Nursing experiences in war-time have given Christie a knowledge of poisons (augmented during her world travels) that Kurs of the over-determined name expects her to deploy.
![Dennis Glover's The Last Man in Europe.](http://web.archive.org./web/20170717131303im_/https://www.fairfaxstatic.com.au/content/dam/images/g/x/0/6/w/h/image.related.articleLeadNarrow.300x0.gx62el.png/1500011020429.jpg)
The ensuing technical business and Christie's besting of her tormentor are competently handled. What we were not prepared for was the coda – "an exclusive extract from Andrew Wilson's next Agatha Christie adventure – A Different Kind of Evil". Still reeling from her domestic trials, his heroine is sent to the Canary Islands to investigate the murder of a secret agent. Already this seems an imposition, and a book too far.
Robert Louis Stevenson removed himself to another island, almost as far from Europe as he could go, to Samoa, where his memory is still treasured and his house has become a site of pilgrimage. He went there with his American wife, her son from a previous marriage, and his own doughty mother. Stevenson dabbled in inter-tribal conflicts and those between Britain and Germany for control of the island. In 1892 he was followed to Samoa by the portrait painter Girolamo Nerli. Then – more than a century later, and on the scent of each of them – by the bipolar art historian, Lewis Wakefield.
![English writer Dame Agatha Christie in 1946.](http://web.archive.org./web/20170717131303im_/https://www.fairfaxstatic.com.au/content/dam/images/g/u/t/4/w/h/image.related.articleLeadNarrow.300x0.gx62el.png/1500011020429.jpg)
In The Pacific Room, Fitzgerald moves between these two periods. Stevenson comes in and out of focus; is both closely observed as awkwardly he dresses and dissolves into legend and the physical remains – house, books, photographs – that attest to his presence in Samoa.
We witness the meeting of Stevenson – to the Samoans, Tusitala, "the teller of tales" and Nerli, who decides that he ought to be called Tusiata, "a sketcher of shadows". The painting was finished, and often reproduced, its "atmosphere /... at once simple and severe, Samoan and Scottish". Nerli will vanish into obscurity in Auckland, not before impregnating the Stevensons' English maid.
![Scottish novelist, poet and traveller Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894), circa 1880.](http://web.archive.org./web/20170717131303im_/https://www.fairfaxstatic.com.au/content/dam/images/g/q/t/h/j/x/image.related.articleLeadNarrow.300x0.gx62el.png/1500011020429.jpg)
As Wakefield wanders dreamily in and out of the past, Fitzgerald gives us glimpses through contemporary Samoan eyes of atrophied tribal ways, but still tenacious belief in a world of spirits, sexual ambivalence, the economic lure of New Zealand.
Essentially this is a book about its own making: Stevenson's story is told obliquely, showing his contemporary impact and enduring reputation, deploying sources, intelligently guessing. Yet this is a novel of muted drama, and of an oddly languid ambition.
The only writing Stevenson does in Fitzgerald's novel is the late story The Beach at Falesa. By contrast, and aware of the risks of reductiveness that he runs, Glover's The Last Man in Europe is chiefly concerned with where the works of George Orwell came from, to which the life of their author, Eric Blair, is secondary.
Thus episodes in the north of England in the depressed 1930s set us on The Road to Wigan Pier. His disenchantment with Stalinism makes him anathema to the British Communist Party, but leads to the creation of that terrible menagerie, Animal Farm. This was the work that first made Orwell money. Before then we see his labours for the BBC, as a freelance journalist, with publishers. Finally came the culmination of his career (although it is not as fine as some of his non-fiction), the book that also hastened his death: the dystopian classic Nineteen Eighty-Four.
There was a long foreground, that Glover expertly sketches. He imagines how Orwell gradually sought to outgrow the hero of his early career, H.G. Wells, in predicting the future; responded to the betrayal by Stalin of the left-wing faction for which he fought in Spain; how steadily, and with contained rage, he heard the hollowing out of meaning in language (we are unnecessarily given the anachronism "fake news") and from this dreadful process created Newspeak and Doublethink.
Orwell's relations with two loves of his life – Eileen and Sonia – are handled with an astute sense of what the public standards of the time imposed even on radical thinkers. Glover musters an impressive empathy for Orwell. His book is both a tribute to the latter's indefatigable labour and the portrait of a man whose deepening melancholy maybe overcame his hopes of change.
Peter Pierce is the editor of The Cambridge History of Australian Literature.