JULIAN LEATHERDALE Palace of Tears. Reviewed by Jeannette Delamoir
This generational saga centred on a lavish luxury hotel in the Blue Mountains has all the ingredients of intrigue, scandal and tragedy.
Palace of Tears is one of those big sprawling sagas, a narrative of several generations’ loves and losses buttressed by the author’s historical research into some of the less familiar currents of early 20th-century history.
Set in the fictionalised town of Meadow Springs in the Blue Mountains, the novel focuses on the Palace, a particularly splendid hotel built by department-store impresario Adam Fox, based on luxury spa resorts in Europe:
It would be a place of calm and elegance where guests would come to heal both their bodies and souls with contemplation of the views and treatments from the local spring waters. It would feature the most modern technology in the world, including a telephone system so that each guest would be able to make a call from their room …
This is Julian Leatherdale’s first novel, and he acknowledges the debt he owes to the real history of the Hydro Majestic in Medlow Bath, built by department-store magnate Mark Foy. Leatherdale has researched and written for television series, and has a keen instinct for the novelistic potential of historical events. This story brings together the sophistication of global modernity and the Australian bush, and combines the glitter and glamour of consumer culture with the homeliness of a small regional community.
In creating his novel, Leatherdale mixes its fictitious elements with real events and actual people. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, opera star Nellie Melba and Australian film-makers and directors Raymond Longford and Lottie Lyall all visit Adam Fox’s luxurious resort.
The book doesn’t tell its story in a straightforward manner. The first chapter opens with Angela in 1914, and the following chapters go forward to Lisa in 2013, and then back to 1904 with a focus on Freya. The modern-day chapters provide the narrative frame, as photographer Lisa and local historian Luke untangle the mysteries of the Fox family. Lisa is a descendant of that family; Luke has been commissioned to write a history of the Palace for new owners about to open a freshly updated establishment. And as they work together on their shared goals, their relationship deepens to romance.
Along with the reader, Lisa and Luke discover that the history of the hotel intertwines with the story of the family who live in a cottage next door – much less well off than the wealthy Foxes but, over generations, sharing tragedies as well as love, hate and jealousy. The thick photinia hedge between the two properties is a place for children to play and a boundary of inclusion and exclusion.
Through official documents, newspaper reports, family scrapbooks and the surprising arrival of previously unknown overseas relatives, Lisa and Luke discover all manner of twists. Just as television’s Who Do You Think You Are? frequently reveals the messy side of family stories, so too does this novel. People change their names and identities, secret relationships bloom and wilt, illegitimate children are given away, families are destroyed in wartime. Treachery and true love coexist. Fortunes are won and lost. And over the decades and generations, the world changes.
One dramatic highlight is the internment of men with German backgrounds – even those born in Australia – during World War II. When Lisa and Luke discover these official cruelties, their astonishment and shame surely echoes the reaction of the author himself.
Other incidents in the book are based on the influenza epidemic at the end of World War I, the hotel’s use as a US Army hospital during World War II, the rise of department stores, the growing tourism industry, belief in spiritualism and ‘water cures’ for illnesses of body and mind, consumerism, frequent bushfires, children lost in the bush, and changing ideas about sexual behaviour.
But Leatherdale doesn’t completely keep control of all the characters and events. I sometimes found the female characters were not strongly individualised and could be difficult to differentiate from each other.
Seeing events from different perspectives further diffuses the characterisation. For example: entrepreneur Adam Fox is presented as kind, as well as ruthless; as a self-aggrandising fake and as a visionary of modernity; as a loving husband, but also as someone who uses and discards people.
At one point, the omniscient narrator describes Fox as having a ‘deep respect for cultural heritage’ and a connoisseur’s taste in art. This would seem to be confirmed by two different women who love him fervently and who are drawn as genuinely artistic. Yet his first wife Adelina, admittedly in a melancholy mood, thinks of him a being ‘without a single atom of refinement or restraint in his bog-Irish soul’ and his hotel as ‘all clutter and chaos’.
While it is certainly desirable to present characters in all their contradictory complexity, reader satisfaction depends on some kind of cohesion among all the fragments – especially when the character is so central.
This issue is not helped by the novel’s episodic structure, with its leaps forward and backward and its shifts of perspective, which interfere with the development of really engaging narrative force.
Yet there is much that is fascinating in this novel. The depictions of social changes over the 19th and 20th centuries, and the Palace and the Blue Mountains setting are all intelligent and appealing.
Given the care and thought that has gone into creating this multidimensional world, I suspect the book might have suffered from being rushed, before being quite ready, to meet a publication date close to the late 2014 opening of the latest lavish reinvention of the Hydro Majestic.
Julian Leatherdale Palace of Tears Allen & Unwin 2015 PB 560pp $29.99
Jeannette Delamoir is an ex-Queenslander and former academic. She combines her passions for writing, reading, culture and food by teaching at WEA Sydney.
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