The Trout Opera by Matthew Condon

The Trout Opera by Matthew Condon
Buy The Trout Opera by Matthew Condon at Amazon.co.uk or Amazon.com
Category: Literary Fiction
Reviewer: Lesley Mason
Summary: Wide-ranging ramble through 20th Century Australia, successfully evoking the harsh romance of the Snowy River pioneers, but less convincing on the late-century crime scene. A bit odd to begin with but worth persevering.
Buy? Yes	Borrow? Yes
Pages: 576	Date: February 2010
Publisher: Doubleday
ISBN: 978-0385615068
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Judges Carrington and Thorpe recline in leather armchairs on the verandah of Buckley's Crossing hotel and watch in silence as a giant trout shuffles across the bridge.

The Judges, despite their initial prominence and convincing back-story giving them a valid reason for being in Buckley's Crossing, will not really concern us. They are there to represent a type: a visitor to small town Australia, a fisherman from the city, a seeker after something in the Snowy that probably isn't fish.

We shall, however, be concerned with the giant trout.

He is the keystone of our story. Wilfred Lampe, aged six, is dressed up to play the King Trout of the Monaro in the eponymous Trout Opera. The opera itself has been written by a German school teacher and is to be performed by the children in lieu of the usual nativity play. This is going to be a tad confusing for the good, but generally simple, folk of Dalgety.

The story of how trout were brought from England to breed and spawn in The Snowy River, Victoria, Australia might strike a chord with Herr Schweigestill, and the children might come to see the birth of fish as an analogy for the birth of the fisher of men, a sign of hope for the future, or what-have-you. Their farm-hand and stockmen fathers however are going to want to know how the stable fits in, and the baby.

There's an abrupt time shift. Two men in suits are taking an unsuitable car over the back-roads of Victoria searching for the Lampe place, looking to visit 99-year-old Wilfred. He has been selected, on the basis of age and background, to play a role in the opening pageant for the Olympic Games. Out of many possibles, the field has narrowed to this one man, who has lived in this outback house all of his life, and all alone since the death of his mother many years before.

Unfortunately, when they arrive Wilfred is not in the best shape.

Meanwhile, in Sydney, Aurora Beck is in hiding. After years of an illegal, drug-ridden life, she has finally run away from her partner in crime, and she knows he will come looking. She has taken his money, and his drugs, but the worst of all is that she dared to run. He will not allow her to get away with that. In her drug-addled dreams, a dead baby haunts her.

Quickly she has found herself another dealer: the older, wiser Tick. A man with a gloriously ignominious past, he has worked the streets in more ways than one, but he takes Aurora on as a sister, and she wonders if this might be the beginning of a genuine friendship. Or is he just another dealer tapping in to the buyer's need?

The narrative switches back and fore between the past and the present. In the past we follow Wilfred's life as he grows up – the events of the night of the Trout Opera, his sister's disappearances, his first muster with the stock, fishing with his father, through death and disaster – a love unrequited, bush-fires, war, and worst of all the coming of the engineers. Through the eyes of a boy becoming a man in the wildest of small-town outposts, we see Australia grow and change.

In the present we see Wilfred taken from his home and lost to those who know him, we see his confusion. Through the eyes of Aurora, her deserted lover Wynter, the strangely endearing (if unnerving) Tick, through the meetings of the Olympic organisers' creative team, and through the ramblings of the host of a late-night radio talk-back show, we see exactly what it is Australia has grown into.

Eventually, as you know they will, all of the characters converge – but in getting to that point you're taken into two opposing realities of twentieth century Australia.

There is the romance of the Snowy River, immortalised by Banjo Patterson in the Man from Snowy River (later adapted and televised as The Macgregor Saga). The hardship of the mountain life. The community. The family. The nearness to the earth and to God for some. The earth, the mountains and the river, being reason enough not to need a god for others.

Then there is the unromantic hardship of life in the modern cities for those who've sunk beneath the dream. Crime is as rife in Australian cities as in any other country. The drugs are just as damaging. The thugs just as deadly.

The unspoken questions are clearly: how did we get from then to now? And is there any way back?

The Trout Opera is a strangely engaging book. To begin with, I was simply irritated by the time-shifts which never stayed long enough to develop the story-line. You don't need to be Sherlock to spot the coming convergences almost from the very start. But eventually the jigsaw starts to meet up and the book draws you in to this world of a man, and a country, growing up, and growing old. And once you're in, it's hard to leave.

The nostalgic sections, the wilderness and how it used to be speak loudest and clearest. The mountains, the river, the fish and the flies, the child on the muster, the animals, sights and smells and sounds – these are the glory moments of the Trout Opera. The modernity and criminality are much more superficially rendered, no less believable, but lacking in either shock value or the unnerving smear of banality.

It's not a short book, clocking up some 550 pages, but the structure is too fractured to be considered an epic. It lacks the sweeping grandeur that would have come from a less episodic approach, and would be needed to justify that epithet.

All in all an enjoyable trawl, full of minute detail, steering sensibly clear of dialect apart from the occasional word, and painting a vivid picture of a time and a place now lost. Don't be mis-led by the publishers' belief that it is inescapably funny. Wry amusement, rather than continuing hilarity is the order of the day.

For any Brits headed down under this Spring – it's a definite recommendation for the long flight.

I'd like to thank the publishers for sending a copy to The Bookbag.

Further reading suggestion: For more tales from down under, try Louis de Benieres' Red Dog.

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