Australian Gospel: A Family Saga by Lech Blaine, Black Inc 2024, 363 pp., RRP $36.99
What’s in a title? Far more freight than two words might seem capable of bearing. Australian Gospel, Lech Blaine’s effervescent memoir, carries its weight with remarkable grace. There is magic in words, and with this effervescent tour de force Lech Blaine, a newish kid on our national literary block, has proved himself a masterly conjuror.
With scintillating switches of scene, swirling complexity underlying what is a straightforward tale on the surface — two couples fight over which family the four children belong to — it all adds up to that seeming oxymoron, a serious pot-boiler.
As well as a high-spirited tract against religious zealotry, this is a gospel of sorts, though the good news emerges only from encounters with various evils. But, reinforcing the book’s title at a more basic level, it is unmistakably an Australian one. Blaine, I think quite deliberately, produces parables that could come from nowhere else.
Throughout the text, brief headings occur by way of introduction to each new scene. Glance at any one — The Other Cheek, The Promised Land, The Saint of Flexible Expectations, to name three — and you'll find your steady attention breaking into a gallop.
Take, for instance, the Parable of the Tall Poppy, a postmodern ripper. There once lived a father, Tom Blaine, who had two young adult sons, Steven and John, as unlike each other as cheese unto chalk. Academically gifted Steven, bored with accountancy, joins his father’s business, and is exiled from Brisbane to run a country pub. When he greets one of the no-airs-or-graces regulars, Brad, with the offer of a handshake, he receives the rude reply: ‘I didn’t ask for a handjob. Get me a XXXX Gold.’ After a week, Steven wants out. His worldly-wise dad swaps in his brother John, while Steven takes up a catering role at Tom’s city hostelry. When John, less educated but more convivial, appears behind the Darling Downs bar, Brad opens with: ‘Are you the ugly brother?’ Cue this magic touch:
John … smiled like a crocodile at Brad and his buzz of blue-collar barflies.
‘I’m the brother who loves punching people,’ said John.
The meatworkers winced.
'It’s these excesses I found problematic. In a book branded as ‘creative non-fiction’, one of whose many virtues is its author’s vivid novelistic style, I embrace the creative. But where does the ‘non-’ stop and the ‘fiction’ begin?'
Tension is