Critique
Letter to the author and critique of Sepik Blu Longpela Muruk by A.C.T. Marke, author of Love on the run and known as the Commander.
COPY
Devonport
18/03/07
My Dear Wall,
It must be a new marketing ploy to send someone a product with an invoice inside. No doubt a huge semi-trailer will draw up soon with a year’s supply of groceries from Coles with the driver flashing an invoice, and all at 40 % above the RRP.
The production quality of the novel is quite good: paper, type and colour.
I was pleased and relieved to see you have reverted to paragraphs, after years of ignoring them in your letters and flier. Perhaps Sarah Walls corrected this?
Why did you allow ‘creative input’ from your associates? This is your show. Can you imagine Shakespeare writing: I am indebted to Anne Hathaway for her creative input outlining the character of Prospero, without which the Tempest would have been abject crap.
Early in the piece at work on Love on the run I realized that Pidgin would have to be accompanied by a translation and so didn’t include any. Much better if you had said: ‘He spoke in Pidgin.’ It is very tedious seeing the Pidgin and translation. It doesn’t flow.
James Ward as a name is too pat, especially for a Catholic. Something like Sean Ahern would sound more realistic.
In the first chapter everyone is either a priest, lapsed Catholic, or thinking about religion. Yet the whole lot are to prove utterly immoral. Surely religion is there as a guide to moral behaviour, a set of values, standards; if people ignore them they are not really keeping the faith.
James Ward is obviously Wall. You have to be careful here as writing gives away as much of your character as dreams. Were you beaten up on a plantation? You mentioned to me before some European overseer bashing natives. This calls for deportation as most of us had reasonable interaction with them. Labour on plantations was more or less slave labour wasn’t it?
I realize that through James Ward you were trying to show Malaria Eradication Officers as rock bottom but you have overdone it.
James dreams of living with a PNG woman in the village and having half-caste children, he then allows himself to be masturbated by another village woman. Then he visits Hong Kong and has a week of debauchery. All the time he is entering another village women whom he apparently impregnates.
No one was as depraved as this. The Administration was against any sexual interaction with locals as well as most of us better Europeans. [Abusing village girls could mean deportation and covering a native one medical assistant described as ‘masturbation of the vagina’.]
The bit in brackets is a sketch of one of A.C.T. Marke’s paragraphs without mentioning names.
Bill Clayton too does a Japanese woman and then goes to ‘Europe’ which is not short of young women of his own race. But no, on his way back he must have a Filipino despite the fact they have nothing in common. Not realistic!
James Ward then leaves his pregnant what? To go off like Odysseus to Lake Veronica – but we are not told why? Looking for Shang-gri-la perhaps.
The novel gives a poor impression of New Guinea expatriates. Bad enough that most doctors were unqualified and foreigners. How about a few morally upstanding characters. Very few were actually covering native girls.
In Love on the run those who sin sexually e.g. non-married, inter-racial sex are vigorously condemned. That is how it was.
How many came to the book launch? What is the Captain’s opinion of the book?
The novel needs an input of romantic love, commitment, passion. Without this marriage and sex is out of the question. It also needs a story.
As C of Es the Captain and I didn’t find lasting passion and have remained aloof. Ditto for John Pasquarelli.
Commander
