Ben Rice: Dingo Lingo
As a boy, I liked those grainy, low-budget children's programmes
from the other side of the world. Someone called Doomy Dwyer
would always be brewing hooch in the creek. A scary indigenous
person wearing little more than a chamois leather and panstick
would be wrongly accused of some shocking crime, only to be
saved by the gutsy children of the parish whose instincts
for truth and justice put their poker-faced parents to shame.
In the defocused background, musterers and shearers exited
the local drinking-den horizontally through a shower of glass.
Absurd marsupials peeped from the undergrowth.
Ben Rice's novella has the same evocative qualities of one
of those half remembered films, combining the exoticism of
the planet's most faraway country with the dusty, actuality
of life in the back of beyond. On one side lies the agoraphobia
of the Australian outback, on the other, the claustrophobia
and parochialism of the small-town of Lightning Ridge. Straddling
the border stands our narrator, one Ashmole Williamson. With
a foot in each camp, the events he describes could well be
the last moments of youthful fantasy before the irreversible
journey into logic, reason and adulthood.
Narrating any tale from the point of view of an adolescent
boy is a risky strategy, and more so when the kid in question
is resident of some nowhere opal-mining town, where linguistic
gems and philosophical nuggets are rarer than the precious
stones themselves. But whether Ashmole's idiolect is true,
fair-dinkum down-under speak or some kind of catch-all Antipodean,
it's a risk that pays off. In his town, people go around
calling themselves fruit-loops. They end sentences with emphatic
conjunctions such as ', but.' and `, like.', and name their
watering-holes the `Digger's Rest' and the `Wild Dingo'. By
sustaining this oddball lingo, Rice creates a wholly believable
world, and so entertaining is the vocabulary that the plot-lines
can bob along gently in the background, without any heavy-handed
programming. Ashmole's tender age also allows for a degree
of innocence or naivety that a wiser commentator would have
crushed. It leaves the reader free to follow up clues and
jump to conclusions. A good example involves a scene in which
Ashmole's pommy Ma drools over a photograph of some unpronounceable
English gent. To Ashmole it's inexplicable, but we understand
full well its significance and symbolism. So despite his James
Bond fixation and some holes in his understanding, young Williamson
is a most believable chronicler. In fact, the gaps in his
knowledge are wholly appropriate to the story.
Because this is a story about nothing. Lots of nothing.
Many layers of nothing, piled up and multiplied like spoil
from a quarry, until it becomes the very essence of people's
life. Ashmole's sister, Kellyane, has two imaginary friends,
Pobby and Dingan. Whether these are the products of her imagination
or the symptoms of an unidentified illness we never really
find out, but things start hotting up when the two of them
go walkabout. The next level of non-existence involves a search
party and a fictitious reward. At the back of all this are
still greater realms of emptiness, which Rice deftly implies.
The hopeless ambition and dreams of the opal miners; the hollowed
out mineshafts under the bare earth; the 'hooey' magic of
the displaced aboriginals; the mother's fading memories of
her homeland; secrets; longing; absence - all set against
the backdrop of a vast, unpopulated continent.
But rather than a series of events or sequence of images,
Pobby and Dingan is more of a chain reaction, the catalyst
being Williamson senior, the ute-driving, vest-wearing, lager
swilling father, a likeable loser wrongly accused of 'ratting'
- ie looking for opals on another man's pitch. Ratting, apparently,
is the prospector's equivalent of crossing a picket line,
or grassing on a fellow criminal, or being identified as a
paedophile by the residents' committee of Portsmouth's Paulsgrove
estate. The family's picket-fence is duly set on fire and
the family shunned. His alibi, based on the whereabouts of
two invisible children, is, to say the least, thin. All elements
of the story move convincingly towards the conclusion - not
just a court case but an unreal funeral and an actual death.
The ending is exquisitely sad and, in another sense, triumphant,
as the power of the imagination wins out over the grimy detail
of everyday life. As the boozy preacher clumsily points out,
there's no real difference between the dead and the makebelieve.
God is the supreme fictional character; surely He can believe
in our other imaginative creations? Surely He can allow Pobby
and Dingan entry into heaven?
Most first novels tend to attract the word 'potential',
but this is an achievement in its own right. Where Rice gets
his literary co-ordinates from I've no idea, but I was reminded
of Steinbeck's The Pearl, of The Go Between,
and also of Clive King's children's classic Stig of the
Dump. In fact, for all its adult sophistication and subtleties,
this is a book which would appeal to an age group not unlike
young Ashmole himself. It would also make a good film of the
type outlined earlier, though this is a much better book than
many modern novels, which are little more than screenplay
proposals by another name. In fact all stories should be as
good as this, and if they can't be, they should certainly
be as short.
Ben Rice, Pobby and Dingan, Cape, 2000, £8.99, 90pp,
ISBN 0224 06110 0
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