FICTION Cherrywood Jock Serong Fourth Estate, $34.99 Sometimes an epigraph tells you exactly what to expect in a book, and how to expect it. Cherrywood has a doozy, taken from Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities : “Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears.
” Such is the curious admixture of Jock Serong’s new novel, a fiction about cities both stable and shifting, filled with figures drowning in love and overwhelmed with sorrow, moving to and fro across the 20th century. Jock Serong doles out his revelations at a careful speed in his latest novel, Cherrywood. Credit: Nicole Cleary It’s 1916, the birth of a new era, and in that dazzling invention, the motor car, the young Thomas Wrenfether is thrown from a crash that claims the lives of his parents.
The inheritor of a great fortune, Wrenfether finds success and a happy marriage until both are placed under strain through a proposal made by his colleague and fellow board member, Ximenon. With 300 tonnes of high-quality cherry wood obtained somewhat mysteriously from the Caucasus, Ximenon proposes the construction of a paddle steamer in a land still open to investment and construction, a city comically distant and unimaginable to the Edinburgh-based businessmen: Melbourne. It’s 1993, and on her way to a dinner party, a young, ambitious and temporarily forgetful Melbourne lawyer named Martha asks her taxi driver to pull over so she might quickly jump out and get a bottle of wine from a pub’s bottle shop.
Pausing only a short time within, it’s nonetheless time enough to be struck by the pub’s uniquely panelled interior and the manner of the young man behind the bar. Serong’s novel shifts between the 1910s and 1990s. Next morning, keen to return to the pub that impressed her in that fleeting moment, Martha smooths out the brown paper bag that once held the bottle, seeing no address and only a single name with which to begin her search: Cherrywood.
This is a novel of connections: some that seem immediately apparent, some that take the novel’s length to reveal themselves. Serong deftly doles out his revelations at a careful speed, but the effect never feels withholding or cynical – this isn’t a “puzzle novel” in which foregrounded narrative trickery supplants character. Instead, the relentless toggling back and forth builds a romantic, sustaining vision.
Serong maintains a careful handle on this balance – for the novel’s first half, the crosshatching of past and present and the connections within are carefully hinted at, with the novel’s prose and inventions remaining sturdily realist. It’s only in the second half, after this careful work has been done, that a more fantastical sensibility emerges. While the 1993 chapters operate in a slightly looser style, full of the simultaneous crudity and energy of the modern era, the 1910s chapters are more effectively mannered and restrained.
Serong is particularly evocative on the pains of distance and absence – so much in these pages feels on the verge of collapse, compromised at every turn with possible failure. Rarely is historical fiction this fraught and alive. The novel’s prose throughout is clear and balanced, and rarely showy for its own sake, though when he does reach for lyricism, Serong finds it effortlessly (“The lifts of the Collins Street skyscraper, banked in vertical channels like the xylem of a mountain ash, were filled with professionals: legal, financial, strategic,” one line reads.
) That mix of the poetic and the prosaic is true of the novel throughout – though unabashedly a work of story-driven commercial fiction, there is enough imagination and vision here to distinguish it from its peers. Its portrait of Martha’s growing romantic longing, and the demands of her exploitative workplace – a stinging portrait of toxic male behaviour, long before that phrase had gained currency – is particularly compelling. Loading Serong’s choice of year in the novel’s contemporary half feels telling, a careful escape from our current digital and factual onslaught that doesn’t sacrifice the modern entirely.
As a result, many of the novel’s fractured realities – architectural, temporal, personal – reveal themselves in a strategically slow and confused way, with the pleasingly compromised speed of a defiantly pre-smartphone sensibility. In the novel’s own words: “That year was one of the few remaining when a great deal was known of the world but not yet so much that the world had become over-known.” This is what the novel summons, and where it skilfully leaves us – between the familiar and the magical, the surveyed and the still to be discovered.
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