Cairo
September 2013
Chris Womersley / Scribe
Given Chris Womersley’s attachment in his first two novels, The Low Road and Bereft, to the criminal end of Australian literary fiction (or is it the literary end of Australian crime fiction?) it seems only natural that his third, Cairo, should take on the story of the most artful crime in this country’s history: the stillunsolved 1986 theft and return of Picasso’s Weeping Woman from the National Gallery of Victoria.
While Cairo isn’t the first novel to deal withthe heist (Anson Cameron’s Stealing Picasso beat it to the post back in 2009), it has great fun riding on the back of a not-exactly hardboiled, but still intrigue-filled plot that plugs the gaps that remain between the publically known facts of the story.
Seventeen-year-old Tom Button escapes to Melbourne from country town Victoria (with its ‘beer-swilling, ute-driving football players called Macca and Robbo’) looking for a bigger world he can belong to. What he finds, in his recently-dead aunt’s Fitzroy apartment, located in the real-life Nicholson Street block named Cairo, is entry to a bohemian world of artists and outsiders that centres on his neighbours, the strangely intense musician Max Cheever, his wife Sally and their part in the plot to steal the painting. It’s a world that is slightly, even dangerously, off its hinges. Not everyone is exactly what they claim to be.
Somewhere between his youthful arrival and the greyer mood of his middle-aged present as an author, Tom picks up a formality of voice that colours his ‘memoir’ with the tint of pomposity. He remembers, for example, that he ‘quells’ his embarrassment, ‘discerns’ the identities of the voices outside his door, and fi nds potting herbs to be an ‘arduous labour’.
These exaggerations set me to worry that Womersley had fallen short in finding the right note for the older, knowing Tom as he tells the story of his naïve past. Exaggeration suggests a mask, and here the device sometimes bars the reader’s access to Tom’s deeper emotional places. For some part of the novel, while Tom is a participant in the events at Cairo, he seems not to be invested in them. The double distance tends to render the events as interesting rather than moving.
But what really lifts the novel is its plot, which, even in its more unlikely moments (and there are a couple) is the clear winner over its style, and by the end of the story Tom comes to learn some hard lessons about love and trust. It’s these that drive him to come out with some classic hard-boiled, and finally revealing one liners. ‘Sally Cheever:’ he remembers, plaintively, ‘I loved her from the time I first saw her, and for the rest of my life, but I loved her most intensely on that afternoon.’
It’s a good hint that Womersley is much more in control of Tom Button’s voice than I had first given him credit for. After all, like Tom, he’s an author making the most of the tall tale he has to tell.
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