Fortunes of Richard Mahony – Book 1 (Australian Felix)

 

The Fortunes of Richard Mahoney has been sitting on my bookshelf for years. It’s not that I don’t admire the author: Richardson’s first novel Maurice Guest (1908) is a true favourite I read once a decade. But I baulked at Mahoney – it seemed overly long; the image on the cover looked too colonial; I liked her Leipzig tale so much it was bound to disappoint. At last, I found a reason: research for my next fictional project would require engaging with fiction and non-fiction to do with 19^th Australia. I pulled Mahoney from the shelf, opened the first page, and plunged in. ‘In a shaft of the Gravel Pits, a man had been buried alive,’ reads the opening line. A few pages later, the grim humour of the anonymous colonial death: ‘Who the man was, who now lay deep in a grave that fitted him as a glove fits the hand’ (pp. 7-9). Paul Giles writes that the novel, ‘takes the theme of the self-made man, the characteristically Victorian trope of a picaresque hero which American fiction reconfigured as the Horatio Alger prototype, and subjects it to the ironies of modernism in an alternative Australian framework’ (The Conversation 9 April 2014). The story indeed opens with several examples of ironic heroes, from a dead miner to a would-be politician/orator in Purdy’s ‘brother diggers’ (p. 24), to our protagonist-in-chief, Richard Mahoney, an Irish doctor playing shop on the edge of the Ballarat goldfields.

To summarise Book 1 (‘Australian Felix’), Mahoney and his mate Purdy travel from the goldfields to Melbourne and stay for a night in pursuit of one of Purdy’s love interests. Oddly, Mahoney is the first to take a wife; a slip of a thing who turns out to be smarter and stronger than the shopkeeper-doctor could have anticipated. Mahoney’s lack of engagement with the radical politics of the goldfields (Eureka Stockade context) costs him the business of miners. Seeing his poverty (now shared), Mahoney’s wife, Polly, helps Mahoney move from his impractical readerly-self into the busy life of a country doctor, and to smooth the way with more established families so that he can earn money. Mahoney begins to crave for family life, but his family isn’t the one he imagines: Polly miscarries and instead she takes charge of her brother’s children. Meanwhile, Mahoney’s fortunes rise, fall, and rise again: he works too hard, and becomes ill, and then stocks he has purchased do well and his practice thrives. Just when it looks like his life in a rebuilt house will be successful and settled, he decides that it is time to return to Britain, and the reader can’t help thinking that this must be a dreadful mistake.

And now, a few places where I turned a page.

The title, ‘Australian Felix’. Mahoney’s brother-in-law has got over the death of his beautiful wife and is making a go of local politics. He is both conservative, and forward-thinking in estimating a more independent Australia (something, arguably, we haven’t yet achieved):

“Our first cry, then, is for men to people the country; our next, for independence, to work out our own salvation. Yes, my friends, the glorious future of this young and prosperous colony, which was once and auspiciously known as Australia Felix – blest, thrice-blest Australia! – rests with ourselves alone. We who inhabit here can best judge of her requirements, and we refuse to see her hampered in her progress by the shackles of an ancient tradition” (pp. 226-227).

(At this point, a “braying and hurrahing” is interrupted by the fall of a pile of shutters on politician John, and the poor fellow suffers fractured ribs).

Middle-aged languor (why did I turn over this page? – I won’t answer, other than to say it spoke to me and also drives the plot in terms of Mahoney’s perplexing decision to give up hard-earned success and return to the Mother Country):

Meanwhile, one held a kind of mental stocktaking. As often as not by the light of complete disillusionment. Of the many glorious things one had hoped to do – or to be – nothing was accomplished: the great realization, in youth breathlessly chased but never grasped, was now seen to be a mist-wraith, which could wear a thousand forms, but inevitably turned to air as one came up with it. In nine instances out of ten there was nothing to put in its place; and you began to ask yourself in a kind of horrific amaze: “Can this be all? … this?” (p. 314).  

Richardson’s skill is to create this figure who frustrates the reader no end, and yet we stand beside him as does Polly (now more maturely named Mary) as Mahoney articulates an egotistical self-story of fallen ideals:

He remembered the purse joy, the lofty sentiments with which he had returned to medicine, Bah! – there had been no room for any sentimental nonsense of that kind here … Oh! he had adapted himself supremely well to the standards of this Australia, so-called Felix.” (p. 317).

So, Mahoney views Australia with distain, as a place beneath him, and yet we see that his success could be one celebrated. The idea of an earlier joy is something that the reader treats with suspicion, having not sensed that in the period he ascribes it to. From these thoughts and decisions, we move quickly to Mahoney’s departure for England, with very well-drawn scenes of an auction of house and possessions and an attempt at a cheerful farewell with friends in Melbourne. Finally, Mahoney’s “curl of the lip” looking back at “scrub-grown sandhills” as they pass through the Heads, and he calls to Mary to “take your last look at the old place [since] It’s not likely you’ll ever see it again” (p. 340).

As one who has left Australia for the best part of a decade, this leaving behind a life built elsewhere to return to the place of your birth (Book II is called ‘The Way Home’) does, I believe, necessitate a kind of scorn for what you must leave behind. But the reader imagines Mary, sensible and long-suffering, lying below deck while her husband drinks with the captain. Richard’s fortunes, it would seem, will not always be on the rise.