Mural

 Mural

Reviewed By  Janet Mawdesley       September 28, 2024

 

Author  Stephen Downes

Distributor:      Transit Lounge
ISBN:                 9781923023185
Publisher:         Transit Lounge
Release Date:   September 2024  

   Website:   https://transitlounge.com.au/shop/mural/

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Stephen Downes has written a captivating, if not downright risky one-man narrative, based on the mysterious psychopath ‘D’, a man who has spent more of his life inside than outside, detained at Her Majesty’s pleasure; this time he believes he is in for the longest time, maybe forever.

His Psychiatrist Dr R (Reynolds) asks him to write down his thoughts, his life history, his journey to where he finds himself at this point in time. He has a laptop which even in his reckoning can’t possibly do anyone any harm.

At no stage to we discover what ‘D’ has done, but early in the narrative it is clearly understood he is obsessed with a young Englishman who came to Australia to breath the fresh air and recover his health. His father was a Ships Captain, his mother brought him up and was both mother and father to the children. ‘D’ considers the relationship between the son and mother to be one that was not a healthy relationship.  Is this a clue as to what formed the man ‘D’ or the family he is descended from is ponderable?

Moving long at a relatively fast pace, the more ‘D’ writes, the deeper he descends into his own form of psychosis, which is at times horrifying but strangely addictive, as ‘D’ moves from fantasy to fantasy, never really explaining whether this is his reality or simply just reality.

A paragraph from Thomas Bernhard’s Reunion, ‘Parents make a child and strive above all to destroy it. I said, my parents just like yours and every parent altogether and everywhere. Parents afford the luxury of children. And they all have their assorted equivalent methods’ commences the story which concludes in a similar vein, leaving the reader with a series of unanswered, but interestingly, formidable conclusions.

Tightly told, Mural is interspersed with illustrations which are the focus of the delusion, or the narrative being told at the time; reality or not is of no consideration. Mental Health is laid bare, the well-constructed thoughts carefully present to craft a hauntingly powerful novel.

Fiction, General