AustLit

'My point of departure for this discussion of The Catherine Wheel is the connection (observed, in passing, by D.R. Burns)  between Elizabeth Harrower’s 1960 novel and Henry Handel Richardson’s Maurice Guest, published nearly half a century earlier (1908). The points of similarity between the two novels are instructive: both trace the inexorable decline of moderate talent and ambition in the face of searing obsession; both treat the question of performance, musical or theatrical, which trumps the force of words and language; both displace their narratives away from Australia to northern cities, reflecting in a further shift their authors’ own departures from Australia; and both focus narrative attention on the impossible, liminal promise of youth and talent, on student life, life without parents or family, pursuing a mode of living where adult maturity is barely imaginable. But while both are heavily invested in melodramatic incident, the dramas of The Catherine Wheel are largely internal, unvoiced, or they take place off-stage, or in the novel’s unimaginable future. And Harrower’s characters are remarkable not for their external acts so much as for their interactions; it is in their relationships rather than their individual personalities that we find the crackle and hum, the pyrotechnics promised by the novel’s title. There is also a dramatic scaling back of narrative scope in Harrower’s mid-century setting compared to Richardson’s: we move from Wagner’s Leipzig to Clemency James’ London bedsit, and much of The Catherine Wheel’s action takes place over the telephone, a mediation working as a further and technologically specific kind of displacement. And while Maurice Guest resolves tempestuously with the suicide of its protagonist, Clem’s narrative (as always with Harrower) concludes bleakly, with the opaque, inconclusive conviction that it is “too late”.' (Introduction)