By Helen Elliott
FICTION
No Church in the Wild
Murray Middleton
Picador, $34.99
Do you remember trying to follow those first episodes of The Wire? Well, readers will want to know exactly where they are with the cavalcade of dealers, users, students, teachers, police, mothers, fathers, cousins and aunts tumbling through Murray Middleton’s gloriously unbowed novel, No Church in the Wild.
The North Melbourne tower blocks are home to many of the characters in Murray Middleton’s novel.Credit: Penny Stephens
Once books, or plays that had more than a few characters and needed a wide stage not only for the elephant or helicopter, always had a dramatis personae or cast of characters as a courtesy to the reader/viewer to allow them to keep up by referring back and forth.
Unbowed is as close as I can come to describing the continuing sense of engagement I had as I read Middleton’s book. In fact, I had been reluctant to read it, as it was another one to make me feel despair and guilt about everything I cannot face right now. I’ve been potholing for the right words since: confronting, audacious, ambitious … all in play, but not quite nailing the imaginative grandeur with which this has been conceived. Eight years it took to write.
Murray Middleton, author of No Church in the Wild.Credit: Eddie Jim
Middleton won the Vogel’s Literary Award in 2016 for a collection of stories. He now writes full time. He reads, obviously, indiscriminately because this book, set in a particular area of inner-Melbourne, shimmers with ghosts of Victor Hugo’s particular Paris. Other readers might channel ghosts of White Teeth or Lincoln in the Bardo. More than most books, No Church in the Wild made me aware how we filter a new book through every book we’ve ever read.
The entire cast of this novel – those mothers, fathers, uncles, cousins all trying to live their one life – are the necessary backcloth to get a grasp on it.
The axial characters, those you worry about, are Ali, living in the North Melbourne flats, still at school, working in McDonald’s, crazy about becoming a rapper; Anna, a dedicated and sincere young literature teacher trying to fathom her own stupidity in the breakdown of her seven-year relationship; Tyler, whose father is in jail, and whose mother is an addict beyond reach; Walhid, intellectual, unforgiving, determined; and Paul, a young cop from a family that, in television ads would be called ordinary Aussie. One point of No Church in the World is that every one of these characters can now be truthfully called ordinary Aussie.
The device that drives these characters is a collective future aim. For some years, the high school where Anna teaches and the local police – not skilled in empathy – combine in a community outreach program to take seven students for the two-week trek along the Kokoda Track. These ultra-urban people, most without gardens and without recourse to nature, will be immersed in the jungle on an excruciating walk.
No Church in the Wild, by Murray Middleton.
That walk is now considered as a real homage to ideals that used to be thought uniquely Australian and an ideal against which to measure current fractured reality. The plan is high-minded: a classless mateship, teachers, police, students all training together beforehand, partnering to result, perhaps, in a transformative two weeks.
Self-reliance is essential, but the critical reliance is on every other member of the trek. Part of the training is climbing the stairs in the tower blocks where most of the students live, with 10 kilograms of rice in a backpack. Paul, who might be the last standing approximation of a bronzed Aussie bloke, starts to get a more intimate, shifting insight into a complex world as he pounds the stairs. Anna, who is naturally open-minded, certainly does.
No Church in the Wild has no pretensions to psychology. Middleton deals in facts, which he presents as a deft and precise montage. The conversations are often in impenetrable dialect and just as often recording things we’d prefer not to know about, not to hear.
All those years ago when I first watched The Wire, Baltimore and the people in it made no sense; I required, at first, a dramatis personae and subtitles. And patience. Middleton requires similar dedication in the initial chapters, but the rewards are guaranteed. Fictional imagination can re-orientate a reader very properly.
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