Writing Disability in Australia:
| Type of disability | Unspecified mental illness, likely autism. |
| Type of character | Secondary. |
| Point of view | First person. |
'This chapter lays out the reasons that the verse novel has been unusually prominent in Australia, considering key examples such as Dorothy Porter’s The Monkey’s Mask (1994), a lesbian detective thriller, and the four other significant verse novels she composed, to the late 1980s trio of Laurie Duggan (The Ash Range), John A. Scott (St Clair) and Alan Wearne (The Nightmarkets). It then goes on to discuss Indigenous and Asian-Australian practitioners of the verse novel form such as Ali Cobby Eckermann and Ivy Alvarez.'
'Murray explicitly centred his thesis on the roots of genocide in his second verse novel Fredy Neptune, which he wrote between 1993 and 1997. The book is the first person narrative of Fredy Boettcher, beginning in 1914 when he is 19-years-old, and covering the next 35 years of his life. Fredy is an autistic Australian man with German parents, who acquires a physical impairment when he is 20 as a result of witnessing mass murder during the Armenian Genocide. The novel also features a significant minor character called Hans, an intellec-tually impaired young man whom Fredy kidnaps in 1933 from Germany and brings back to Australia, so that Hans will not be forcibly sterilised by the Nazis. This paper identifies and explores the arguments advocated in Fredy Neptune with respect to the genocide of disabled people.' (p.72)
This essay explores the reasons why Les Murray's five-book novel in verse Fredy Neptune may be considered a masterpiece of crime fiction for undermining the norms that traditionally codify that genre. The norms regulating especially the detective-story are here seen as epitomising the narcissistic principles that have predominantly shaped mainstream Western art and ideology since the dawn of modern times and strongly impacted upon the course of European history both within national and colonial territories. It is, in short, this entire Western episteme that Murray's novel questions through its 'misuse' of crime fiction, as its German-Australian protagonist gets involved in the two World Wars and becomes a German or a British spy depending on the war-line he happens to find himself. This essay first lays bare the critical framework through which I have looked at Murray's novel; then it points out the way it interweaves with Shakespeare's second Henriad but especially with Woolf's fiction opening a dialogue with these crucial texts of early and late modernity; to then conclude by trying to see what formal connections Fredy Neptune may finally have with the genre of crime fiction. [Author's abstract]
