real church which really existed and he realizes that if you’re going to relate to God
there are a number of possibilities even in church. There’s the dense highly
coloured baroque Catholic relationship to God where saints sort of perch in the tops
of the dense rain forest of Catholic dogma and these highly coloured saints like so
many highly coloured parrots. So there’s the Catholicism he sees as being more or
less like a dweller of a rain forest but in the Methodist church he realizes that this
provides you with a chance in its bareness and its utterness, it provides you with a
chance to be God’s Arab or God’s Eskimo. And one of the characters inevitably
raises this question in the novel I ’m writing now; she’s in the Sudan and you know
you can have in a landscape of mists, she says you can have a sort of cosy intimate
God; in a landscape of deserts you have an absolute God and definitely a ‘he’, the
god of the desert who brings down hammer blows of withering heat on your head
but also presents you with this sort of ultimatum of landscape, this utterness of
landscape. So you know it’s a recurrent theme of mine the question of God in
landscape and that’s one of the reasons why I keep on hammering on about this
and the fact that he is so often the God of John Paul I I is lacking in the Australian
landscape might, you know, at least to me I find that there is something immensely
more ancient, immensely more disorderly, immensely more rooted, and immensely
more ambiguous in our landscape. So hence, comes my taste for ambiguous
people like Thomas Francis Meagher and William Smith O’Brien in The Great Shame.
There are good people who say tut tut, William Smith O’Brien may have had sex
with a minor, and I don’t approve of that in the slightest, but I don’t think it
disqualifies one from writing about it. I mean, in the Old Testament Noah got
drunk, was rendered drunk by his daughters wasn’t he and they slept with him?
Stuff of that ambiguity, those myths of creation are always rooted in ambiguity and
for a good reason, myths of renewal, so I think that there’s some of that ambiguity
in the Australian landscape too. That the Gods who inhabit the Australian landscape
are ambiguous but they’re also grandly whimsical and it just seems that I like that
stuff. I mean it’s either that or accept a God who permits evil because it’s his will.
I ’d rather go with the ambiguous boys and girls.
W H: The questions I have are now more about you and why you write and things
like whether you’re influenced by the characters in you’re novels. Whether they
really do take on an independence, if you like, an autonomy, of their own.
TK: I ’m sure that follows from our earlier agreement, well our rough coincidence,
our general coincidence of views – the place of the unconscious in writing. I t is a
ron
(Ron)
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