of a Secret Agent
Peter Twohig, The Cartographer: An Amazingly Bold, Inventive and Enchanting Novel
(Fourth Estate, 2012)
This is the Great Australian Novel of
Boyhood: Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn, Kim and Harry Potter, all
rolled into one. Instead of the Mississippi and its paddle steamers we have the
Yarra and its ferries; instead of Jackson’s we have Herring Island; instead of
the caves where Tom gets lost and the robbers hide their loot we have the
canals and drains of Richmond. Like Tom and Huck, the unnamed narrator, a
precocious 11-year old identified only as T, witnesses a murder; has important
business in graveyards; worries about meeting zombies, ghosts and vampires
(though knows how to deal with them); and devises schemes to bring evildoers to
justice. Instead of Hogwarts there are the nuns at St Felix’s, and the
practical education provided by his petty crim granddad.
For once the cover blurb is accurate: The Cartographer is an enchanting story,
as well as delightful and compulsively readable. T is resourceful, dynamic,
independent, street-wise, adventurous, cheeky, imaginative, cunning and
courageous, combining all the best qualities of both Slytherin and Griffendor.
He seems to possess the observational powers of Sherlock Holmes, the
inventiveness of Lyra Belacqua (His Dark
Materials) when forced to come up with cover stories at short notice, and
Harry Potter’s sense of social justice. Interrogated by the mysterious Mr
Sanderson (obviously a spook), T hides his true identity, and when asked what
he has been up to replies:
I’ve been visiting my cousin in New Zealand
for a while. His father is a fireman, and recently had to put out a fire in an
office building and rescue a whole lot of people by carrying them down to the
ground, and they gave him a medal. My cousin’s name is Mick, and he’s a year
younger than me, though we’re the same height. His mother says that’s because
it’s a bit colder there than in Melbourne and it does something to kids’ bones
to make them grow faster.
He’s also a bit of a smart-arse. He calls a
dog bought for him on the cheap by his granddad Zac because that way he gets
his money back, and he tells a tram conductor that he does not have enough
money for the fare, but it’s OK because the driver is his dad. He proves this
by saying something in Italian (Buon
Natale), and yelling Ciao papa
when he alights. Exploring a tram depot he is sprung by an employee, but has a
ready excuse: “My dog ran in here, and I think he probably jumped on one of the
trams because when we brought him home from the lost dogs home we took the
Camberwell tram, and he liked it a lot.”
T is surprisingly well read in a huge range
of comic literature, movies and TV shows, and draws on these to build the
superhero identities that he assumes. He begins as a cartographer, mapping the
streets, houses, drains, people and events of Richmond, but can easily
transform himself into a masked avenger or even
Railwayman, who lives underground and drives
his jet-propelled train around the tunnels deep beneath the city, spoiling the
plans of evil men and helping the police to send them to Pentridge to rot or to
hang. Railwayman, who is often armed with a pinch bar that he found in a
railway shed, and who has his own secret supply of hand-grenades; and who, with
his faithful companion, Shadow the Wonder Dog, has taken a solemn vow to
explore underground railways everywhere, and to make maps of them, so that he
won’t accidentally have the same adventure twice.
Like superman or Harry Potter, T has an
acute sense of fairness and a determination to right wrongs, even when the
evildoers turn out to be figures in authority. He rescues the Harrigan boy from
the sadistic kidnapper, plants stolen watches and the boy’s shoe in his hideout
and leads the police there to ensure that he is caught and convicted. He can’t
save Flame Boy from being subjected to Electro-Convulsive Therapy by the
sinister Dr Stern, but avenges him by smashing the machine afterwards, thus
protecting others. He tries to ensure that the crooked cops who beat the man to
death in Shamrock Street are brought to justice by firing a bullet into the
corpse and dumping the shotgun in the boot of their car. And if he is misguided
when he tries to save the kids in his class from the polio injections, by
turning on a firehose, at least he does so from noble motives, recognizing that
the principal purpose of medical treatment in those days was to torture
children, especially boys.
The danger with books narrated in the first
person is that the tone becomes monotonous and the wisecracks repetitive. The Cartographer does not fall into this
trap, as T remains fresh and inventive throughout, with an amazing range of
voices, as befits his changing identities. He can be as hard-boiled as Sam
Spade: “Much as I wanted to catch up on old times – ask him who he had
strangled lately and so on – it really was way past my bed-time” – as he dashes
past the murderer sprawled on the front steps of the Palmers’ house. Or as
didactic as a teenager explaining new technology to his granny: “Cemeteries are
generally terrific places to play: they have no adults who are alive, and no
dogs, as dogs are afraid of ghosts.” The only problem is zombies, but the trick
is to carry a big stick and smash its brain before it can bite you. He has a
powerful line in whimsy:
It’s true that Railwayman does like a bit of
a drink after a hard day’s railroading – he’s a man who likes to live hard and
play harder. That’s why he’s a Railwayman, for Christ’s sake. But he does not
get a big thrill from waking up as sick as a parrot.
And at times he displays the rueful
goofiness of none other than Bertie Wooster:
I resumed my walk, though it had lost all of
its jaunt, and try as I may, I could not find one single jaunt in my whole
body.
I wasn’t as bold as brass: I was more like
bold as corrugated iron.
Now I’m not one of those kids who, on
hearing that he has to have an injection, says: “What, just the one?” No, I’m
more like one of those kids who suddenly remembers that he has to be visiting
his sick grandmother that day.
The one personality that T never seems to
display is that of an 11-year old larrikin from Richmond: he is far too articulate,
well-read and reflective for that. And it’s just as well: in real life a boy
from his background, even in 1959 (long before TV and smart phones crushed
individuality), would have uttered little more than grunts, groans and
colourful profanities – none of which would have made for a lively reading
experience. T has more in common with Saki’s self-assured “feral ephebes” and
impish boys whose sense of strategy when outwitting adults (especially aunts)
puts the average general to shame.
One such (in “The Lumber Room”) is
Nicholas, who refuses to eat his bread and milk one morning, offering the
frivolous excuse that there is a frog in it. When his aunt states firmly that
there could not possibly be a frog in his bowl he shows it to her: he knows
very well it is there, as he had put it there himself. His aunt was wrong: “
‘You said there couldn’t possibly be a frog in my bread-and-milk; there was a
frog in my bread-and-milk’, he repeated, with the insistence of a skilled
tactician who does not intend to shift from favourable ground.”
Nicholas is punished by not being allowed
to visit the beach with his cousins. This suits him very well, as what he
really wants to do is explore the attic, the place where his aunt stores all
her beautiful and interesting things. He lays a false scent for her by giving
the impression that he wants to play in the forbidden gooseberry garden, and
while she is keeping an eye on that he snaffles the key. Among the hidden
treasures is a tapestry showing a hunter who has just shot a stag, but does to
seem to notice four wolves galloping towards him. Nicholas is fascinated:
“Would the man and his dog be able to cope with the four wolves if they made an
attack? The man had only two arrows left in his quiver, and he might miss. …
Nicholas sat for many golden minutes revolving the possibilities of the scene;
he was inclined to think that there were more than four wolves and that the man
and his dogs were in a tight corner.” Nicholas gets into further trouble that
afternoon when he declines to rescue his aunt from a water tank into which she
has fallen, explaining that he was sure the voice was really the devil tempting
him to enter the gooseberry garden. The frozen atmosphere at tea does not worry
him, however, for he has much to think about: “It was just possible, he
considered, that the huntsman would escape with his hounds while the wolves
feasted on the stricken stag.”
It’s the same capacity for entering
imaginatively into stories that makes T such lively and endearing character.
The Cartographer’s only rival for the title of the Great Australian Boyhood Novel
would be the novels of Paul Radley, especially Good Mates. These are ruled out, however, by three problems. First,
they are not primarily about boys, but adolescents. Second, they contain too
much sex – though admittedly not more than is appropriate or would be expected
in a novel about teenagers. (In fact, T’s complete silence about sex is a touch
implausible: even at 11 years most boys are quite interested in their dick, and
fascinated by questions like the origin of babies. Since one cannot imagine
somebody as streetwise and canny as T lacking curiosity about or knowledge of
these matters we must assume that his extreme reticence is an instance of the pas devant les grown-ups principle –
poor dears, they are so easily hurt and offended they must be protected from
such brutal realities.) Third, and perhaps most significantly, Radley’s books,
several of which won young writers’ awards, turned out to be not entirely his
own work, but were co-written by his scheming uncle (evidently somebody with
certain characteristics in common with T’s granddad). I don’t see how these
revelations make the stories any less engaging, but they seem to have cast a
cloud over their respectability, and nobody much has anything to say about them
these days.
There are no such problems with The Cartographer, which does, however,
present a different kind of problem, and a few puzzles. At one level the novel
is a straightforward story about the adventures of an 11-year old superhero,
but you cannot help suspecting that it has other layers of meaning as well –
that there is something else going on behind the scenes. For a start, there is
the mystery of T’s relationship with his dead twin, Tom; as he explains (in a
rare unguarded moment): “Tom was my twin brother. He died a year ago down the
park in an accident. No one could tell us apart. He was a bit of a kidder. He
liked to have fun. He liked to do dangerous things.” It sounds like a
description of T himself, and there are moments when both his father and his
mother call him Tommy. And this is not the only mystery. There is also the
counterfeiter/murderer and the puzzle of how he gained access to the
underground railway; the connection between T’s granddad, Auntie Queenie
(evidently a retired madam) and the copper who shot T’s dog; and the hints
about his mother’s secret work (in Military Intelligence?) during the war, and
the nature of her surprising connection with Mr Sanderson.
So strong are the hints of cloaks and
daggers that I was reminded of Kim
(the story of an Anglo-Indian orphan recruited by British Intelligence for the
Great Game) long before Mr Sanderson actually gave the book to T. We should
have expected something along these lines, given that the murder house stands
in Kipling Street. The name Tom recalls Tom Sawyer, but his surname Blayney
suggests Thomas Blamey, commander of the Australian military forces during
World War 2 and, legend has it, patron of Alf Conlon’s mysterious Directorate
of Research and Civil Affairs.
For all the thrilling episodes of gripping
(apparent) realism you get the nagging feeling that something else is going on.
The drawing of T’s ever-expanding map mirrors the process of writing the story,
and you can’t help wondering whether he is imagining these adventures as he
reads the Phantom and other hero comics. (Perhaps they take place in his head
during his “turns” and blackouts. Is this why the evil Dr Dunnet suggests ECT
as a cure for his “lies”?) There is no apparent “frame” to the novel that would
authorize or direct such a reading, but I am left with the suspicion that I
have missed something important, some key that would explain why the central
character is never named or given any physical description, and why the narrative
is peppered with flashbacks to the playground accident in which Tom was killed.
For all that, T is such an engaging and
indeed lovable character that you would like to prolong the acquaintance and
might even dream about moving to Richmond in the hope that he might drop in for
creamy soda and biscuits. He seems so alive – and perhaps he is. As I was
writing this appreciation I suddenly noticed that somebody had pencilled the
letter T on the wall beside the staircase from the kitchen. Spooky!
