It's a Small Martial Arts World: Mates of Mars and the Foster Novels

Abstract

Nationalist text and internationalist context combine to form a Gargantuan whole in Foster's fiction. The Pure Land, featuring an ambiguous dialeètic between Christianity and Mahayana Buddhism, compares the respective claims to symbolic promise of Australia and America. The two nations are tellingly differentiated: America, a more advanced culture, has been determined by its war of independence; Australia, a less advanced culture, will be shaped by republicanism, the "bloodless coup" (77), consigned to an indefinite future. In Moonlite, Foster historically revisits the nineteenth century; mythically, the novel takes in all time and is largely the Christian story of a redemptive possibility for reprobate mankind. Plumbum, which plays with ideas of ascent and its demonic counterpart—the word plumbum means lead—reconstitutes the genre of apocalyptic literature. Dealing with a group of musicians who, like the Pied Piper of Hamelin, lead the elect on a spiritual odyssey, the novel depends for its effect upon Neoplatonic conceits of music. The sequel, comprising Dog Rock and The Pale Blue Crochet Coathanger Cover, takes as its theme the dedine of Pastoral—Arcadian Dog Rock is overtaken by the twentieth century and Sydney's suburban sprawl. Paradoxically, the novels revivify the pastoral genre, the conventions of which govern their composition. Foster's idiosyncratic protagonist is exiled Briton, D'Arcy D'Oliveres, whose baronial heritage and royal wedding invitation inevitably infuriate his neighbours, the "ignorant colonial[s]" (96) of Dog Rock. The Adventures of Christian Rosy Cross, a unique blend of scholarly picaresque, is populated by Dominican and Franciscan Friars, among whom Foster's larrikin Christian figures incongruously. Testostero, the novel which profiles the Australian tourist abroad in Venice, invokes the improvised, vernacular Commedia dell' Arte as its raison d'etre. The characters are recognisably the traditional masks - Punchinello, Judy, Arlecchino, the pimp, courtesan, and pedant. Identical twins Noel Horniman and Leon Hunnybun are separated at birth as part of an experiment designed to distinguish nature from nurture. Hurinybun is raised in Britain; Horniman dispatched to Australia, "the most deprived cultural environment conceivable to an English gentleman" (69).