CLAIRE G COLEMAN The Old Lie. Reviewed by Michael Jongen
The award-winning author of Terra Nullius returns with an ambitious new novel melding speculative fiction, war and history.
The Old Lie is probably the most satisfying novel I will enjoy this year. The title is from Wilfred Owen’s World War I poem ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’, in which he writes of the futility of war, life in the trenches and the cost of patriotism. Its concluding lines are:
The old lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.
(It is a sweet and fitting thing to die for one’s country.)
Claire G Coleman is a trickster; her writing is cunning and she is skilled in illusion; she challenges our perceptions and assumptions; my mindset was thrown several times by plot and character revelations. This is ambitious speculative literature that messes with genre and respects history. We are reading a story set in space, a story that also reflects the politics of World War I and the alliances that caused it. The movement of refugees through space echoes contemporary attitudes towards the stateless. As well, Coleman draws a link to the treatment of the Indigenous Australians who fought for Australia in two world wars.
The novel opens with Melbourne sweltering in 46-degree-heat. Buildings and objects begin to explode and catch fire spontaneously. In the middle of this chaos, space ships arrive, and so the story begins.
The reader is thrown into a battle scene, where Corporal Daniels and other surviving troopers begin a retreat. Through the mud and the haze and intermittent explosions they attempt to grind their way back to their base. These scenes contain some of the finest descriptive writing in the novel:
Corpses floated, drifted, forming log-jams of bodies, leaking themselves bloodless, bone white, staining the once fertile plains with their life, their loss. There were so many corpses, so many, too many, how could so many die? How could there even be that many people in the world to kill?
Corporal Shane Daniels was lost, the grey uniformity of the sky and dirt, the rain, the muck, had rendered the flat, bomb-wracked plain featureless. What trees, what buildings there must have been were long since gone, all there was to navigate by was foxholes, trenches and bomb-craters, all now full of corpses, rainwater and diluted soupy viscera.
Readers gradually begin to understand that we are not in the fields of Flanders but in the middle of a war between the Federation (with which the Earth is aligned) and the Conglomerate. In the air, human space pilots are desperately holding off Conglomerate forces so that the remnant Federation troopers can get back to base and be evacuated from the planet. Romeo, a derring-do pilot with a wild reputation, fights to ensure that Daniels has a chance. It’s personal.
Having fought his way back to the remote space station, Daniels, now the senior officer, gathers a motley crew of surviving troopers, space-station personnel and refugees and prepares to repel the Conglomerate forces now attacking the base.
This is a war novel that reeks of acridity, discordant sounds and desperation. Only fleetingly do we pick up clues to the larger context. The characters have been at war fighting for Earth and the Federation for so long that they have lost their connection to Country in their grim bid for survival.
The war has created refugees and stateless beings from all parts of the galaxy. They huddle in space stations where they are barely tolerated and actively exploited. They wait for visas which allow them to move on in their desperate search for safety. The Federation controls movement from one place to another and its language facilitates communication between the species who live under its protection.
Jimmy, a young human, is one of them. He has no papers, having escaped indenture on a remote planet. Now he is trying to get back to Earth to find his mother and father:
It was worth the risk though – any risk was worth it to get another step, another hyperspace jump, closer to Earth. He hoped to stay one step ahead of the authorities intent on catching him. He was fairly sure they had not tracked him to his last destination, so they could not have tracked him here, but on such a small station it would be too easy to stumble upon unwanted attention. That was why people like him, desperate, homeless, fugitives, lived so dangerously close to the edge.
Walker is another one who has escaped from the authorities. He is driven by his need to return to Country and speak to his ancestors. William is in a prison cell but has no idea how long he has been there or how much longer he will have to stay. We are thrown into the lives of these refugees, the sheer drudgery and ever-present danger they encounter as they negotiate bureaucratic hurdles.
This is a disciplined novel, with admirable plotting and structure. Coleman has a powerful way with words and the novel reeks of claustrophobia and fear. Her descriptions of the stations and their hierarchies as the troopers and refugees move through the system convey the mundanity and purposelessness of the process.
Coleman brings the strands together as the reader begins to understand the context of the war and its impact on Earth. Will these disparate but connected humans return to Earth, and what will it mean if they do? Daniels and Romeo, separated from their families and from Country for so long, begin to understand their situation; their need to survive and fight has dulled them to what it is they are fighting for, and what has been going on at home.
This is not a space opera, yet the penultimate section of the novel gives us scenes worthy of Star Wars, and there is joy and triumph to be found within it. Coleman offers no pat conclusions. We would not expect that from the writer of Terra Nullius.
When Walker returns to Maralinga, he meets with Kelly, who has never left Earth. This is a crucial meeting:
‘Good morning, Walker, you seem better today.’
The wind was talking in the voices of ghosts, whistling through the spinifex, making the needles of desert oaks dance.
‘Not better,’ he almost whispered, ‘still dying, but I can feel my Country, feel my old people talking to me.
‘My Country is waiting for me,’ he said. ‘I can feel it, I am nearly home, it’s still there, it’s sick but it is still there. My old people need me, we need to look after that Country, need to make it safe again. I can hear them, my old people, they came to me last night, told me they are still here in Country, even though our Country is sick, they are still here.’
This is a novel about time, place and being human. There is little interaction between humans and the alien species apart from encounters with officialdom, but the book challenges our perceptions of what constitutes humanness and humanity. The Big Lie invites us to consider the politics and the challenges of our world.
Claire G Coleman The Old Lie Hachette Australia 2019 PB 368pp $32.99
Michael Jongen is a librarian who tweets as @michael_jongen
You can buy The Old Lie from Abbey’s at a 10% discount by quoting the promotion code NEWTOWNREVIEW here or you can buy it from Booktopia here.
To see if it is available from Newtown Library, click here.
