Genre-bending in Elsinore

Somewhere in the Brisbane Courier-Mail’s archives there’s a black-and-white photograph taken in March 1965 of two stylish young women quietly enjoying a beer in a public bar. One is wearing a white tailored knee-length suit, the other a timeless light-coloured short-sleeved frock. By today’s standards they look as though they’re going to a garden party, but if you let your eyes slide down their clear nylons towards their white stiletto heels and high wedges you’ll notice a dog chain and padlock securing them by the ankles to the bar’s foot rail.

The pub is Brisbane’s up-market Regatta Hotel; the women are Merle Thornton and Ro Bognor, and the chain and padlock signify their refusal to be ‘disappeared’ into the ‘Ladies Lounge’ while their spouses and colleagues network, close deals and socialise in the public bar. “It is not just the right to drink in bars we are seeking,” Thornton said at the time. “We are after equal educational opportunities and equal treatment in every direction.”

Forty years on, and after a long career as an academic, scriptwriter and playwright, Thornton has published her first novel. Given her background you’d expect her to offer readers a good strong thought-provoking brew rather than a fizzy commercial genre-fiction cocktail, and she does. She also transgresses established genre boundaries as if they were 1960s drinking laws.

After Moonlight opens in a Carlton bookshop within walking distance of a certain sandstone university. The 37-year-old narrator, Claire Meredith, a part-time university teacher and documentary filmmaker, is thumbing through the Oxford Companion to Philosophy (the entries for Free will and Determinism) while she tries not to think about her ex, a Foucault-fixated lecturer and “pathological tail-chaser” called Roger Wilkinson, with whom she desperately wanted a child. After surviving seven years of Roger’s Foucault-speak Claire is reduced to defining herself as “Foucault flotsam”, a mere “vehicle for the discourse of domesticity”, but she remains obsessed with this man. She stalks him, harasses him with phone calls, and gatecrashes his new lover’s thirtieth birthday party in the house she once shared with him. She gets very drunk at the party, behaves outrageously and is ‘rescued’ by Jim, the university’s Deputy Vice-Chancellor, who gives her a lift and a grope in his “midnight blue Porsche”.

This brief synopsis of the first few chapters might suggest that After Moonlight is a satirical Campus Novel in the tradition of Lucky Jim (Kingsley Amis), Groves of Academe (Mary McCarthy), The History Man (Malcolm Bradbury), or more recently Human Stain (Philip Roth) and I am Charlotte Simmons (Tom Wolfe). Roger’s appallingly bad behaviour with his female students; the DVC’s grope and ongoing affair with the novel’s protagonist, the aridity of his marriage, his disenchantment with the institution he describes as “an advanced kindy”, and his uncritical embrace of the university’s new “entrepreneurial spirit” are classic Campus Novel themes. The painfully ironic eulogy to “disinterested inquiry” from a “distinguished classicist and defender of the humanities” at the launch of Claire’s corporate video, and her students’ inability to peer below the surface of Hamlet in her English Literature classes also fit the Campus genre. Academics will either grin or grimace as they recognise the institutional pathologies Thornton’s female narrator both observes and participates in.

But there are also elements of Tragedy in After Moonlight. Claire is haunted by the ghosts of her dead parents; she experiences periods of madness; she has a psychotic sibling; her sandstone ‘kindy’ is as malevolent as Shakespeare’s Elsinore; and she and the people she lives with are all escapees from families that are as dysfunctional as the Prince of Denmark’s. So is Thornton rewriting Hamlet from the point of view of Ophelia? Well—no. By the end of ‘Act III’ Claire and her friends are all poised to live happily ever after, as though they’re in a Chick-Lit Romance, or even a classic Quest, a mythic journey of self-discovery.

In a Quest reading Claire becomes a very fallible female hero who climbs a high mountain (Hong Kong’s Mount Victoria on a naughty long weekend) to confront her demons and slay the evil ‘power-knowledges’ that have entrapped her. She is then able to leap into another genre to construct a new identity for herself, a new story in which she is victor rather than victim.

So next time you visit your local, pleasure raise your glass to Merle Thornton, not only for her decades of feminist activism, but also for the genre-bending threads she has “plaited and spliced and plied” together into this, her ‘true fiction’ about the internal contradictions so many of us white middle-class women still struggle to resolve in the ‘real world’.

— Merrill Findlay, Overland

Merle Thornton, prominent feminist activist and mother to Sigrid, has been dabbling in creative writing for some time. Her first novel, After Moonlight, follows the turbulent life of Claire, a 37-year-old part-time filmmaker and academic. Claire is in the throes of a relationship breakdown, which leads to some bizarre behaviour as she stalks her former lover, has a rebound that comes unsprung, creates a share household of hand-picked eccentric and troubled individuals, and fights the good fight on the career front. Thornton has a zany and perceptive sense of humour and a talent for getting into the head of her comic heroine. Her descriptions of bohemian Carlton will raise a knowing smirk from anyone who’s lived there. Comparisons to Sex and the City would not be amiss – this is an irreverent romantic comedy, alive with local colour, that centres on the trials of an independent urban woman.

– Cameron Woodhead, The Age

THESE FIRST NOVELS by Joel Deane, the Victorian premier’s speechwriter, and Merle Thornton, a former academic who famously chained herself to a male only bar in Brisbane, focus on radically different social groups. Deane’s Another is about two unemployed adolescents living in an outer Melbourne suburb bypassed by a freeway where the local McDonalds is the town’s nucleus. In After Moonlight, Thornton presents a bookstore browsing, duck eating, macchiato-sipping, Carltonish academic. (The novel is replete with such portmanteaux.) That both novels are set in the same city is a shock. Another commonality, more poignant, is a concern with the personal and the enduring effects of tragic pasts.

... [comments on Another]

Thornton’s book is about another world, one in which broad Australian accents are commented upon. Its protagonist, Claire, is a pretty, thirty something redheadd who wears ‘well cut slacks’ and is a part time academic at Melbourne University. Claire shares a house with Gerda, who knits soft sculptures, and Bryce, a gay consultant. She also has an unhealthy obsession with her ex, a senior university lecturer, formerly her teacher. Roger is a stereotypically lazy academic but hard working lecher, who is ironically writing a Foucauldian book on power operations in educational institutions. Claire teaches Hamlet and, behaving more like Hamlet than Ophelia, stalks Roger. She crashes his parties, makes prank calls and spies on him. Her actions are often comic, as are her tutorial exchanges with her students, which read like less offensive episodes of Mind Your Language.

This is a lighter novel than Deane’s, but it too concerns the personal past and inescapable pain. The loss of Roger is not the problem (it may even come as a relief to the reader). The loss of Claire’s parents, who died in a car accident when she was a child, is the real issue. Claire’s brother is in an asylum, clinically depressed. Thornton’s novel, like Deane’s, also contemplates Aboriginal dispossession.

After Moonlight’s strengths are in characterisation and plot. Claire is engaging: impulsive, secretive, caring and blunt. Her relations with her housemates are almost real: they’re chatty or grumpy; they’re sometimes selfish and other times supportive; they insult each other and eventually move on. They call each other best friends, but one gets the sense that they barely know each other. Claire’s stalking episodes are well staged for pathetic comic effect, and her dutiful interactions with her institutionalised brother are affecting. However, some of the stream of consciousness devices, more prominent at the beginning, can make reading difficult, and passages of philosophising about power and story, and their relationship to subjectivity, are clumsy and stall the narrative.

After Moonlight is partly about the need for women to locate themselves outside patriarchal structures – quite a difficult task in a patriarchal society. This is something Claire, exploited by a corporatised university, attracted to powerful men and wanting children, has to work through. Gerda, her housemate, who had a child after a one night stand of ‘weakly consensual’ sex, is way ahead of her. When Claire asks about the absence of men at Gerda’s exhibition, ‘Matrilineal Images’, Gerda replies they’re ‘in the ambience. It’s not them I’m attending to.’

Thornton is a well known feminist. Her novel contains the memorable line: “‘Family values” is code for “make women slave for their male rellies”. Deane’s book, however, is more explicit about the sins of men. In addition, while After Moonlight features affairs and quotations from Shakespeare, Another seems to have more faith in love, its romance reminding me of that famous passage from Romeo and Juliet: ‘He jests at scars, that never felt a wound. / But, soft! what light through yonder window breaks? / It is the east, and Juliet is the sun.’ ... [comments on Another]

– Maria Takalander, The Australian Book Review

Thornton’s writing is lively and energetic and the novel has pace.

– Antoni Jach

I like the structure, the tight plot, the various subplots and supporting characters, the energy, the sense of time and place.

– Bronwen Levy

Stylishly written, clever and funny... really interesting to read—all the way along.

– Dan O’Neill