Hippie Trip Goes Feral In Byron

Sydney Morning Herald

Saturday July 23, 2005

Leslie Cannold

After the Party

By Jesse Blackadder

Hardie Grant, 299pp, $22.95

Jesse Blackadder's first novel is an exploration of the physical and eclectic social terrain of Byron Bay: Sydneysider holiday escape and stopover de rigueur for the backpacker set. The novel follows the chain of events set into motion by Zac's near-death experience at a party given by the emotionally inscrutable Black Dragon.

Over a three-week period, Zac, Black Dragon, her friend Madeline and Zac's girlfriend Kate roam between Sydney and Byron, seeking and ultimately discovering important truths critical to unlocking their true vocation or potential for love.

Blackadder knows Byron well, though she is most successful in conveying its unique hippy/cosmopolitan groove indirectly through the matter-of-fact way she describes some of its more bizarre denizens. Like, for instance, Pan and his half-feral cross-dressing band of male faeries who rescue Zac from a failed ocean suicide attempt.

The following morning, Zac wakes to find himself in a house that is "single-handedly holding back the advance of the rainforest" near a makeshift dome enclosing "a solemn circle of seven men and women and a small, smoky fire". Just then a man dressed as a woman in a gold cocktail gown and a pink feather boa totters into view. "Yoo hoo! Pan! I'm late as usual. I lost my f---ing eyelash on your f---ing muddy path. When are you going to get a man to do some work about the place?"

Less convincing are the over-wordy riffs about and to the place sprinkled liberally - and unnecessarily - throughout the text. Riffs that sometimes run for pages with lines such as "Welcome to Byron Bay, so beautiful it will make you weep" and "You are the gazumper on the dream home, the developer who buys the last of the breachfront land."

I also grew to detest the subheadings scattered through each chapter. At best, they unnecessarily foreshadowed events (such as the one entitled "Foccacia" that keyed me into the fact that the next few paragraphs would contain someone eating one). At worst, they were eye-rollingly twee, like "You Give Me Fever", preceding Zac's sweat-drenched awakening to a serous flu-like illness. Occasionally, a smug omnipotent narrator creeps into the third-person voice, begging the question of his or her identity and source of knowledge about the characters' past and future.

Sometimes Blackadder's risks succeed. Throughout the tale is the motif of the stalking hand of death whose needs must be sated to balance the books of fate. When Zac evades death's grasp in the early pages, an ageing whale succumbs instead, the mourning cries of its pod filling the ocean with sadness.

Later, it is the life of a young girl, whose story intersects with that of the mysterious Black Dragon, that is snatched in the place of the new relationships, lives and possibilities that have emerged since the party. None too original, but Blackadder carries it off well, adding to After the Party's cosmic beating-of-the-butterfly's-wings theme of the interconnectedness of nature and those linked through the bonds of love.

Reviewed by Leslie Cannold, an ethicist, writer, commentator and researcher at the University of Melbourne. Her latest book is What, No Baby? Why Women Have Lost the Freedom to Mother and How They Can Get it Back (FACP 2005).

© 2005 Sydney Morning Herald

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