Indeed all is light, from the bright sun to the yellow detergent to the benign mood, just the thing to serve as an antidote to the dark of Dark Places. But the lust, like the love, is lightly done. It is also a lust story, and its account of the repressed, emulsion-conscious, ‘sometimes she thought she would rather be dead than old’, Felicity Porcelline – ‘porcelain’ and ‘little pig’, I take it – for Freddy Chang, especially the fly on his jeans, is quite wonderful, if perhaps unfair to rural bank-managers. Under a bridge, gazing up at the corbels, of course.īut The Idea of Perfection is not only a love story. Or, more appropriately, to quote the novel’s epigraph from Leonardo Di Caprio, I mean da Vinci, ‘an arch is two weaknesses which together make a strength.’ But you can’t for the life of you see how they are going to overcome their respective inglorious muteness in order to come together, to quote the Beatles and Thomas Gray.
the minute she hits town, are made for each other, like the two halves of a bridge that must meet perfectly in the middle – no symbols where none intended, as Beckett wrote. Somehow You, the Reader, know that Douglas and Harley, not to mention the dog which adopts H. She, Harley Savage, who has recently suffered a heart attack, or ‘infarction’, or ‘dicky ticker’ – this novel is wonderfully deft in its use of italics, though it wouldn’t get away with them in The Sydney Morning Herald – is the daughter of a famous artist, represents the Sydney Museum of Applied Arts, and has come to Karakarook – Aboriginal for ‘elbow-shaped’ the local Chinese butcher-photographer tells the carnally explosive Felicity Porcelline as an occasion for touching her elbow – to assist in establishing a Heritage Museum in order to attract Tourism, that last resort of once-noble communities and ignoble universities. He has come to the moribund Karakarook to replace a bent timber bridge with a concrete one. He, Douglas Cheeseman, son of a VC decorated war hero, is a bridge builder, a ‘pontist’, who suffers from vertigo and a shyness that borders on inarticulacy.
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