Worm reviews Ian Callinan's searing spellbinder The Coroner's Conscience ... Love, torment and death ... A tragic femme fatale ... A spicy journalist ... A bishop ... A coroner ... Something for everyone ... From Justinian's Archive, December 3, 1999
What insights can a lugubrious High Court justice offer on "the realities of the life of a successful and beautiful single career woman"?
A staggering amount, judging by The Coroner's Conscience, the latest literary offering to leak from the pen of the court's resident John Grisham, Ian (The Tub) Callinan.
In his new fictional blockbuster, The Tub leaves behind the deeply flawed characters inhabiting high judicial and political office - the theme of his first novel, The Lawyer and the Libertine.
Instead, we are transported into a sort of emotional bottom of the harbour scheme, involving a grisly coronial inquiry into the mysterious death of Louise Genson (nee Rupe), the "beautiful merchant banker", whose body is discovered in her Jaguar at the bottom of Sydney Harbour.
The Tub is a master of pathos. Was it murder and, if so, at whose hand? Her obsessive father? The alcoholic ex-husband? The spurned lover? Or the bishop, recipient of her unrequited affections?
As the mystery unfurls, and the details of Louise's life are revealed, readers are able to share The Tub's insights into what makes the late 90s woman tick.
Take, for instance, the musings of the coroner, Sidney Marcus, a disillusioned, lonely soul, whose wife spends the duration of the novel in a coma on a life-support machine. In fact, most of the character's in a Tub tome are either rejected by lovers, alcoholics, unbelievably beautiful and successful or significantly blighted with disability.
Sid struggles, unsuccessfully, to overcome his desire for Trudi Smith, the ravishing reporter. As the author observes:
"Women like her came into a man's presence, smelling of perfume and sexuality, big powerful leonine women, heiress to the secrets of a thousand generations of female power, a dominatrix without whips."
It will be hard to find anywhere in contemporary literature a better expression of the way Sid mused about the rangy womanhood Trudi embodies:
"Girls like that, girls like these journalists, independent, clever, effective, when it suited them, all seemed to lead untidy lives, dangerous ones even. They all said they would like to have children. However, sometimes, sitting in this court and hearing accounts of the traumas of maimed and disfigured bodies, of suicides, of horrendous tangles of metal and flesh, of daughters abducted and missing, he thought they were better without them."
It should be said straight away that those who appear before the High Court could do well to spend many hours carefully deconstructing the collected works of the tubby one, to divine and second-guess that most contained of minds.
Trudi explains to a panting Sid the secret of her successful rise to high rating television reporter. The lovers' exchange goes like this:
"How did you move from journalist to leading presenter?'
"Do you want the truth?"
Before he could answer, "The current affairs producer liked me - a lot. I've shocked you haven't I?"
"It's not my business."
"Yes I have. And yet each day you listen to stories of tragedies, murders, suicides, dreadful accidents. What's wrong with a little bit of strategic coitus?"
Sid knows he's onto something here.
Trudi is full of revelations about the female psyche. The pair are seated in her red Cabriolet BMW, and Sid asks the leading question:
"Do all career girls have exotic cars?"
"What do you mean?"
"Louise Rupe and her Le Mans Jaguar. It's what the young, successful men used to do."
"There's no difference today."
His implied censoriousness irritated her. "To get on, we have to be as they are at everything - counting, exploiting, climbing, remembering, forgetting, fighting and fucking."
But back to the tragic femme fatale. Louise begins her career in the bowels of the public service, at the Commonwealth Immigration Department. Here she meets Eddie Asterwood, head of the records section and old enough to be her father, whose "real interests in life were predatory ones. Until now they had been satisfied by restive women in their late twenties or thirties, disaffected by the tedium of the typing pool by day, and their boyfriends or husbands by night".
Louise and Eddie's first illicit encounter takes place at the Bondi drive-in, where "Lassie Come Home" is screening. Louise "discards" her virginity to the wretched Eddie.
Of course, its only a matter of pages before she loses interest, in both Eddie and the public service. The Tub lets rip with some powerful imagery:
"Eddie now treated her with a wariness that a man might feel about an elegant and well groomed bitch with a reputation for biting if crossed, quite unlike the amiable Scottish sheep dog they had seen so briefly on the screen that night at the drive-in."
Louise's career gets frantically busy. She comes third in the 1972 Cronulla Beach Sun Girl contest, and the prize is free tuition at Mrs Marvin's deportment school and a new husband, Lance Rupe, second hand car salesman.
Deportment school lands the dame a gig as hostess to sleazy television personality, Mike Grappler, on the Channel Five matchmaking program, Fate and Forfeits. This career move flops, as does the marriage. Louise needs greater intellectual stimulus so it's off to university, explaining to Lance:
"I wouldn't be any good to you, cleaning the old cars in a tiny bikini. I'm too old for that now."
And for someone thirsting for intellectual challenge, merchant banking cannot be far away. However, her fellow bankers are beastly, calling her: "bitch, tease, frigid, ice-maiden and a latent lesbian".
Undeterred, she rises above her hostile environment. Louise and colleague Giles Sparkley are sent to New York on a multi-million dollar deal. After heavy negotiations, they celebrate their success in the hotel room. But not before Louise lays down the ground rules:
"You understand, don't you, there's one condition. You don't talk about this. You never mention it, in your locker rooms, or your bars, or the golf course, or on the trading floor, or wherever else the big boys play their games."
Later, sadly, Sparkley's worst nightmare was realised when Louise gives it to him straight:
"There is nothing between us. You have become a nuisance. If you don't leave me alone I'm going to ask the senior partner to speak to you."
The Tub has a few more twists and turns in store for his girl. In the end it is she who falls, wildly, stupidly in love - with the local Anglican bishop, Henry Eppsville.
Bishop Eppsville has a heart of stone, yet the relationship is a good opportunity for Justice Callinan to explore the vexing issue of women in the church. Justice Handley will be most interested in this lively exchange when the heartless Eppsville is confronted by a feisty feminist parishioner, left nostril pierced, "hair as short as an American marine's". She says:
"That's very much the problem, your generation of men, in fact most men don't even know when they're being patronising. That's the trouble with the church. It's a bastion of male privilege, discrimination against women - and others - but you're worst with women."
Louise plies the bishop with gifts, but she can't get the leg over. A $500 alter vase fails to win him, as does a $20,000 donation for the church fund:
"'You must stop this, now. Stop it.' His voice was raised. 'But we're in love'. 'Don't be ridiculous. I'm not in love. It's out of the question, a middle aged, older than middle aged, bishop, a married man and you a divorced woman. Unthinkable.' 'We don't have to marry. I'd do anything.' 'Louise you must stop now. You are infatuated. Lots of impressionable women fall briefly for their spiritual advisers'."
This life of failed relationships and unfortunate career choices leads Louise to the bishop's medicine cabinet, where she gorges herself on tranquillisers. She then heads to her Jag, which, unlike the men in her life "had never let her down: a car for a companion and lover".
Over the wooden railing and into the bay the car and its owner plunge.
"As the Le Mans slowly sank and when it rested on the seabed, the water seeped through its apertures, slowly filling the cabin. And Louise slept on, on, until, as the water reached her neck, she dies."
In its own endearing way The Coroner's Conscience is also a tranquilliser that could take you to the bottom of the harbour. It is a must for every Christmas stocking.
The Coroner's Conscience
Ian Callinan
Central Queensland University Press
$19.95
Worm