Peter Craven
For eight years Andrew Upton shared the artistic directorship of the Sydney Theatre Company with his wife, Cate Blanchett. Philip Seymour Hoffman directed Upton’s play Riflemind and, during this period, the Upton/Blanchett company looked like a national theatre company, with legendary productions such as The War of the Roses directed by Benedict Andrews, and A Streetcar Named Desire directed by Liv Ullmann. Now Upton has written a fable set in a late-’30s Bavaria, with Hitler’s war and the bloody reign of the Nazis portending horror and murder on an unprecedented scale.
Krank Fuss means bung foot, and the book reaches us at one remove and then another. Its narrator is a man with little knowledge of German, labouring to translate a manuscript left by his late mother – a manuscript written for her before she was born by her own father, a shell-shocked veteran of the First War keeping a farm in Bavaria while the second gathered.
What the grandson reconstructs, haltingly, is the grandfather’s fable: the story of a lame chook called Krank Fuss whose life is saved by a benign farmer in the face of his neighbour’s scepticism. There’s also a chicken who’s thought of as fleet of foot, though she isn’t, and fears for her safety. And the massive, horrid insignia of the spider that lies still until it attacks with tremendous savagery. There are rats that bite and crows that kill.
Above all – and providing a deep bond – there is Krank Fuss’ friendship with Gibby, the toad who aspires to be a frog and is proud of his amphibious character. The relationship is moving in Upton’s hands, and it is the one part of this novella that suggests some hypothetical parallel with Bavaria, which calls out for the depth and amplitude of allegory.
The prologue involving the two farmers – one happy to see Krank Fuss die, the other not – points not only to the death of the narrator’s mother but to the grandfather’s predicament: a man who has been devoted to the honour of Germany yet wonders what a nationality can mean. This is a world where everything is liable to be misshapen or inappropriate.
Anyone who has read the reports of a great publisher knows how canny and cold-eyed they can be when it comes to allegory. T. S. Eliot looked at George Orwell’s Animal Farm in manuscript; wasn’t there, he wondered, a difficulty with the Trotskyite pig, Snowball, as opposed to the Stalinist pig, Napoleon? And beyond this, the eminent churchman and author of The Waste Land wanted to know: was this a lucid and coherent allegory or simply a warning about what sort of pigs you choose?
This is the real difficulty with Krank Fuss. There is an image late in the piece where Krank Fuss eats a butterfly and it tastes marvellous but the Lord knows why. Is it a symbolic invocation of the idleness of pure pleasure or simply an effect of idle beauty leading nowhere? There’s a sense in which it doesn’t matter and a sense in which it does.
Upton runs the risk of writing a handsomely peopled children’s story that lacks any translation of the world it pictures, then punctures, like so many idle narrative balloons. The upshot has a kind of beauty, in resurgent snatches of meaning that fade or regurgitate in their repetition. In a funny kind of way, this makes Krank Fuss a bit more like The Magic Pudding than it is like Animal Farm.
None of which denies the bejewelled character of the narrative invention, nor the physical beauty of the book, with its handsome hardback binding, its rich, thick paper and its evocative drawings. Krank Fuss has an affinity with Upton’s theatre work: it’s sleek, subtly modulated and never lets a chance go by. These are not grave sins but they do indicate a conscious compression and an emphasis on brighter surfaces.
Krank Fuss by Andrew Upton is published by Puncher & Wattmann ($34.95).
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