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Fredy Neptune
Despite laudable efforts by Vikram Seth and Anne Carson, the novel in verse isn't exactly a fashionable genre. It seems to promise readers a ripping good yarn, only to bog them down in slant rhymes, enjambments, and other linguistic niceties. Yet even the staunchest fiction fans may find it hard to resist the charms of Les Murray's Fredy Neptune. For one thing, the hero--an Australian itinerant named Friedrich Boettcher--engages in the sort of adventures that are usually reserved for his opposite numbers in prose. Fredy fights aboard a German battleship during World War I, witnesses several of the worst slaughters of our century, and journeys from the Holy Land to Africa to America to the Far East before making a final landfall back in Australia. But Murray's eight-line stanzas are also eminently readable: slangy, swift, and jam-packed with narrative propulsion.
Fredy Neptune isn't, it should be said, a mere action movie in verse. After our hero witnesses the genocidal slaughter of some Armenian women, he undergoes a sympathetic reaction that would perplex the likes of Indiana Jones:
I was burning in my clothes, sticking to them and ripping free againDetached from human feeling, endowed with superhuman strength, Fredy continues his odyssey, which takes him through so many of the era's premiere trouble spots. At one point he fetches up in Hollywood, serving as "an extra just then for the famous Prussian director / who I thought sounded Australian, when he wasn't talking English." And there he encounters poetry-loving vamp Marlene Dietrich, who sells him once and for all on the merits of Rilke's "The Panther": "It sat me up. This wasn't the Turk's or Thoroblood's 'poems', / big, dangerous, baggy. This was the grain distilled. / This was the sort that might not get men killed." Murray's own poem is too discursive, perhaps, to match Rilke's 86-proof lyricism. But it's plenty big and dangerous, and even in its baggiest moments, Fredy Neptune remains an exhilarating read. --Bob Brandeis
shedding like a gum tree, and having to hide it and work.
What I never expected, when I did stop hurting
I wouldn't feel at all. But that's what happened.
No pain, nor pleasure. Only a ghost of that sense
that tells where the parts of you are....
276 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1998
14 people are currently reading
445 people want to read
About the author
Les Murray
79 books63 followersLeslie Allan Murray (born 1938) was the outstanding poet of his generation and one of his country's most influential literary critics. A nationalist and republican, he saw his writing as helping to define, in cultural and spiritual terms, what it means to be Australian.
Leslie Allan Murray was born in 1938 in Nabiac, a village on the north coast of New South Wales, Australia, and spent his childhood and youth on his father's dairy farm nearby. The area is sparsely populated, hilly, and forested, and the beauty of this rural landscape forms a backdrop to many of Murray's best poems, such as 'Spring Hail':
"Fresh-minted hills
smoked, and the heavens swirled and blew away.
The paddocks were endless again, and all around
leaves lay beneath their trees, and cakes of moss."
His parents were poor and their weatherboard house almost bare of comforts; Murray remarked that it was not until he went to the university that he first met the middle class. His identification was with the underprivileged, especially the rural poor, and it was this that gave him his strong sense of unity with Aborigines and with 'common folk'. The title he chose for his Selected Poems, The Vernacular Republic, indicates both this sense of unity and his Wordsworthian belief that through the use of 'language really spoken by men' poets can speak to and for the people.
Many of the Scottish settlers on the New South Wales coast had been forced out of Scotland by the Highland clearances of the l9th century, and they in turn were among those who dispossessed the Aboriginal Kattang tribe around the Manning valley; in later years Murray's own father was forced off the land by family chicanery. The theme of usurpation, whether of land or of culture, as well as the influence of Murray's Celtic background, often make themselves felt in his work, as one sees in poems such as 'A Walk with O'Connor,' in which the two Australian Celts try in vain to understand Gaelic on a tombstone, the grave becoming symbolic of the death of Celtic culture:
"...reading the Gaelic, constrained and shamefaced, we tried to guess what it meant
then, drifting away, translated Italian off opulent tombstones nearby in our discontent."
In 1957 Murray went to the University of Sydney to study modern languages. While there he worked on the editorial boards of student publications. At Sydney he was converted from the Free Kirk Presbyterianism of his parents to Roman Catholicism, and the influence of passionately held Christian convictions can be seen everywhere in his verse, though seldom overtly; instead it shows itself, in poems such as 'Blood' or 'The Broad Bean Sermon,' in a strong sense of the power of ritual in everyday life and of the sacramental quality of existence. 'AImost everything they say is ritual,' he remarked of rural Australians in one of his best-known poems, 'The Mitchells.'
He left Sydney University in 1960 without a degree, and in 1963, on the strength of his studies in modern languages, became a translator of foreign scholarly material at the Australian National University in Canberra. His first volume of poems, The llex Tree (written with Geoffrey Lehmann), won the Grace Leven Prize for poetry on its publication in 1965, and in the same year Murray made his first trip out of Australia, to attend the British Commonwealth Arts Festival Poetry Conference in Cardiff. His appetite whetted by this visit, he gave up his translator's post in 1967 and spent over a year traveling in Britain and Europe. Travel had the effect of confirming him in his Australian nationalism; he was a republican who believed that Australia should throw off the shackles of political and cultural dependence, and he saw his work as helping to achieve that end.
On his return to Australia he resumed his studies, graduating from Sydney University in 1969. After that he earned his living as a full-time poet and writer. He was one of Australia's most influential literary critics.
Leslie Allan Murray was born in 1938 in Nabiac, a village on the north coast of New South Wales, Australia, and spent his childhood and youth on his father's dairy farm nearby. The area is sparsely populated, hilly, and forested, and the beauty of this rural landscape forms a backdrop to many of Murray's best poems, such as 'Spring Hail':
"Fresh-minted hills
smoked, and the heavens swirled and blew away.
The paddocks were endless again, and all around
leaves lay beneath their trees, and cakes of moss."
His parents were poor and their weatherboard house almost bare of comforts; Murray remarked that it was not until he went to the university that he first met the middle class. His identification was with the underprivileged, especially the rural poor, and it was this that gave him his strong sense of unity with Aborigines and with 'common folk'. The title he chose for his Selected Poems, The Vernacular Republic, indicates both this sense of unity and his Wordsworthian belief that through the use of 'language really spoken by men' poets can speak to and for the people.
Many of the Scottish settlers on the New South Wales coast had been forced out of Scotland by the Highland clearances of the l9th century, and they in turn were among those who dispossessed the Aboriginal Kattang tribe around the Manning valley; in later years Murray's own father was forced off the land by family chicanery. The theme of usurpation, whether of land or of culture, as well as the influence of Murray's Celtic background, often make themselves felt in his work, as one sees in poems such as 'A Walk with O'Connor,' in which the two Australian Celts try in vain to understand Gaelic on a tombstone, the grave becoming symbolic of the death of Celtic culture:
"...reading the Gaelic, constrained and shamefaced, we tried to guess what it meant
then, drifting away, translated Italian off opulent tombstones nearby in our discontent."
In 1957 Murray went to the University of Sydney to study modern languages. While there he worked on the editorial boards of student publications. At Sydney he was converted from the Free Kirk Presbyterianism of his parents to Roman Catholicism, and the influence of passionately held Christian convictions can be seen everywhere in his verse, though seldom overtly; instead it shows itself, in poems such as 'Blood' or 'The Broad Bean Sermon,' in a strong sense of the power of ritual in everyday life and of the sacramental quality of existence. 'AImost everything they say is ritual,' he remarked of rural Australians in one of his best-known poems, 'The Mitchells.'
He left Sydney University in 1960 without a degree, and in 1963, on the strength of his studies in modern languages, became a translator of foreign scholarly material at the Australian National University in Canberra. His first volume of poems, The llex Tree (written with Geoffrey Lehmann), won the Grace Leven Prize for poetry on its publication in 1965, and in the same year Murray made his first trip out of Australia, to attend the British Commonwealth Arts Festival Poetry Conference in Cardiff. His appetite whetted by this visit, he gave up his translator's post in 1967 and spent over a year traveling in Britain and Europe. Travel had the effect of confirming him in his Australian nationalism; he was a republican who believed that Australia should throw off the shackles of political and cultural dependence, and he saw his work as helping to achieve that end.
On his return to Australia he resumed his studies, graduating from Sydney University in 1969. After that he earned his living as a full-time poet and writer. He was one of Australia's most influential literary critics.
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Displaying 1 - 21 of 21 reviews
February 8, 2022
I have to admit that at first I found the idea of reading a verse novel of two-hundred-and-fifty-odd pages somewhat intimidating. Do we, denizens of the smartphone age, still have what it takes to read a book-length poem, the dominant literary form until the early modern age?
As it turned out, Fredy Neptune was a reasonably accessible read. For the most part it has no rhymes and no consistent metre, so it's a bit like a traditional novel written in truncated lines. The language, however, is exceptionally rich, and Murray playfully demonstrates his mastery of the English language by freely incorporating words in regional dialects (from Australian to Welsh), obsolete terms and borrowings from foreign languages - including Japanese, Yiddish and Arabic.
The protagonist, Fred Boettcher, is an Australian country boy with German origins who joins the merchant navy. Early in WWI he finds himself in the port of Trabzon, where he witnesses an unspeakable atrocity done to Armenian women by a Turkish mob. As a post-traumatic reaction his body is inflicted with a short-term bout of leprosy, and when recovered he discovers that he is no longer capable of feeling pain - a condition that becomes a super-power of sorts.
A long series of picaresque adventures follows. Fred takes part in World War I in Egypt and Palestine, works as circus strongman Fredy Neptune in post-war Australia, moves to Hollywood (where he is employed as an extra and meets Marlene Dietrich), Germany of the Weimar Republic, the Soviet Union under Stalin (where he arrives on board a zeppelin) and finally to Japanese-occupied Shanghai - a long chain of episodes ranging from the engaging to the anecdotal. When seen as a coherent whole the different scenes add up to a reflection on human aggression and selfishness as it had manifested itself during the first half of the twentieth century, the bloodiest period of all time.
Les Murray was subjected to intense bullying during his school years, and the metaphor he uses - that of a protagonist who has been so traumatised that he can no longer feel pain - has really saddened me. Now that Murray is no longer with us (he died in 2019) Fredy Neptune remains as a ciphered confession of his pains and as a longstanding monument to his creative talent.
As it turned out, Fredy Neptune was a reasonably accessible read. For the most part it has no rhymes and no consistent metre, so it's a bit like a traditional novel written in truncated lines. The language, however, is exceptionally rich, and Murray playfully demonstrates his mastery of the English language by freely incorporating words in regional dialects (from Australian to Welsh), obsolete terms and borrowings from foreign languages - including Japanese, Yiddish and Arabic.
The protagonist, Fred Boettcher, is an Australian country boy with German origins who joins the merchant navy. Early in WWI he finds himself in the port of Trabzon, where he witnesses an unspeakable atrocity done to Armenian women by a Turkish mob. As a post-traumatic reaction his body is inflicted with a short-term bout of leprosy, and when recovered he discovers that he is no longer capable of feeling pain - a condition that becomes a super-power of sorts.
A long series of picaresque adventures follows. Fred takes part in World War I in Egypt and Palestine, works as circus strongman Fredy Neptune in post-war Australia, moves to Hollywood (where he is employed as an extra and meets Marlene Dietrich), Germany of the Weimar Republic, the Soviet Union under Stalin (where he arrives on board a zeppelin) and finally to Japanese-occupied Shanghai - a long chain of episodes ranging from the engaging to the anecdotal. When seen as a coherent whole the different scenes add up to a reflection on human aggression and selfishness as it had manifested itself during the first half of the twentieth century, the bloodiest period of all time.
Les Murray was subjected to intense bullying during his school years, and the metaphor he uses - that of a protagonist who has been so traumatised that he can no longer feel pain - has really saddened me. Now that Murray is no longer with us (he died in 2019) Fredy Neptune remains as a ciphered confession of his pains and as a longstanding monument to his creative talent.
July 18, 2015
This was quite the read. Murray has a knack for capturing humanity, and his narrative poem ends up being about just that--the need to see humanity in everyone. Early in Book 1, Fredy is forced to work a German naval vessel in World war I and, while in Turkey, witnesses a group of Armenian women burning. His horror at this atrocity causes him to develop a leprosy-like ailment and loose all connection to his body--he has no sense of touch and suddenly develops great strength. He lives through the rest of both World wars, watching and touching all the horror that surrounds modern warfare. As a blue-collar hymn to integrity and respect, Fredy Neptune is marvelous. Fred's insistence that having been "both sides" he can't pick one, his rejection of prejudice as much has he can (best seen in his interactions with Leila/Leland, a genderfluid circus performer), and even his assertion that "an army against its own people" is "any police" reveals the working-class truth that Fred champions in his actions. He sees everyone as simply someone, just another worker--until they prove themselves to be otherwise. Murray calmly weighs against all totalitarian ideologies in Fred, with comments like "Sex is a Nazi among animals, true. I just wanted/it not to be, fully, among people" when confronted with a boy who was to be sterilized. As a war novel, this poem is as brilliant as anything I have read. Murray does not shrink from the terror that is war, does not hide the violence of the battlefield, of persecution, of Germany's "Police Revolution" under the Nazi party. When Fred sees people who were murdered by Japanese soldiers on a Pacific Island, he says
This poem is elegant and flowing, but lacks in "moments". Like the scenes of destruction, the points of incredible music that Murray crafts out of his easy narration disappear into the story. New Zealand is "a mad giant's teapot, that country, shit, steam and wet leaves;/you crawl up the spout and down." In Hollywood, Fredy discovers "Most folks just preen and watch themselves sidelong,/ playing themselves, the Farmer, the sacrificing Mother." The move to the tense Nazi state is captured in six lines:
On the dirt under a flagpoleThese terrifying scenes are smoothly hidden in the matter-of-fact story Fred gives us; Murray wants us to remember the scenes as part of the story, not as something we can find and skip; one must know the whole war, the "bloody trench" that Fred sees stretching across the world cannot be avoided when dealing with violence. You know that some horrific scene must be coming, but it isn't until it is upon you that you realize just how evil the violence will be. In Fred and his loyalties only to stopping the destruction, protecting everyone who can't save themselves, his fervent division between all of his people and his homes, Murray has created a scathing critique of violent nationalism, and a powerful force for peace. Sam's final message to Fred describes the whole arc of the book, but instead of giving up, Fred's story is a chance to change this position: "'Tell Fred that Noah couldn't bear/to look at the ground' or maybe 'to look at the drowned'"
lay seven white people, bloodied and like sleeping. Father Wogt
was one of them, and he'd been split open with a sword
so you saw the halves of his heart and liver and organs.
This poem is elegant and flowing, but lacks in "moments". Like the scenes of destruction, the points of incredible music that Murray crafts out of his easy narration disappear into the story. New Zealand is "a mad giant's teapot, that country, shit, steam and wet leaves;/you crawl up the spout and down." In Hollywood, Fredy discovers "Most folks just preen and watch themselves sidelong,/ playing themselves, the Farmer, the sacrificing Mother." The move to the tense Nazi state is captured in six lines:
You couldn't get round how quiet Germany had gotand these nuggets of poetic gold melt back into the giant shining alloy that Murray makes out of his verse novel. It is consistently wise and smooth, without consistently sparkling. This did take longer to read than most other novels its length, unsurprising given its form, although it was slower than some long poems, mostly due to the difficulty of its subject and the scope and time that Murray captures in his work.
in three or four months, from big talk and whingeing and songs
and heart to heart midnight drinking that German men love,
that any men love, to bang! all eyes down, mum's the word,
the wowsers have the floor. When the police revolution comes
you find you can't guess who are police."
January 16, 2015
'End with Fredy Neptune!' Les Murray told his biographer Peter Alexander. 'It is the story of the Twentieth Century, it is the big story, the fate of the Germans and the fate they visited on others'. I’d forgotten exactly what I’d read about Fredy Neptune in that literary biography – I only recall it was the one book of Les Murray I had to read. So I did and found a novel in verse, a novel that covers the first half of the 20th century through the peregrinations of the eponymous hero, the story of a man of the people as opposed to the police, whose tale engages in the fast telling and whose character attracts a slow empathy through a surreal turn of events in obscure little corners of history. An Antipodean of German extraction he dives into his wild career like Forrest Gump – Murray says he never saw the film before he wrote the novel – and takes us round the world with him, through the two wars, an Everyman meeting characters and politics, situations and morality in an unconventional flow of language and striking image. He turns the story in a sentence mid-stanza and races through dire conditions that apply to the human race as much as to him, Fredy the survivor. Turn the page to enjoy a stimulating shower from the poet and polymath with the next bucket of words, maybe not all so sweet, which bring you up short with his allusions, acute turns of phrase and a facility to reshape perception. 'There’s a lot of me in Fredy' said Murray, and to that you can add incident and people from his life. Murray himself was a victim of tribalism; the police in the book equate to mobs and their rule from which he’d suffered. He engages with the ‘isms’ that have swept the world so disastrously. Fredy and Murray are very appealing – not for nothing was he subsequently awarded the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry.
October 1, 2012
Witnessing the immolation of a group of Turkish women at the start of World War I, an unbearable event he could not prevent, Fredy Boettcher loses all sensation, becoming a ‘numb hulk’ who must remind himself to maintain the illusion of being able to feel.
The story follows Fredy, an ethnic German-Australian seaman, from the start of the First World War through to the close of the Second. The poem chronicles his shipboard jobs, his wild adventures, narrow escapes, and flights from police states. The 265 page narrative weaves its way among the classes most vulnerable to mass slaughter while presenting Fredy as a witness to a century desensitised to cruelty and suffering. With Fredy—and through him—we seek a way to feel anew and attempt a deeper understanding of world events that are unbearable to recall.
Writing a novel in verse allows for greater freedom than is available in either genre on its own. The result is, quite simply, a haunting, beautiful work. There are mythological resonances, echoes of the great epics of the past. However, Murray resists “transposing an existing myth into modern dress” and pooh-poohs the rush of critics eager to ‘hogtie’ Fredy to the Ancient Mariner and Odysseus simply because the main character is a sailor.
While such a long narrative poem is daunting to many readers, Fredy Neptune is really a fast-paced adventure story of the best sort—thrilling and meaningful at once. Deliberately cast in non-literary language, this is, nonetheless, a literary masterpiece from one of Australia’s greatest living poets. First published in 1998, it has now been re-released—and I hope this time to as much acclaim in Australian literary circles as it has received abroad.
The story follows Fredy, an ethnic German-Australian seaman, from the start of the First World War through to the close of the Second. The poem chronicles his shipboard jobs, his wild adventures, narrow escapes, and flights from police states. The 265 page narrative weaves its way among the classes most vulnerable to mass slaughter while presenting Fredy as a witness to a century desensitised to cruelty and suffering. With Fredy—and through him—we seek a way to feel anew and attempt a deeper understanding of world events that are unbearable to recall.
Writing a novel in verse allows for greater freedom than is available in either genre on its own. The result is, quite simply, a haunting, beautiful work. There are mythological resonances, echoes of the great epics of the past. However, Murray resists “transposing an existing myth into modern dress” and pooh-poohs the rush of critics eager to ‘hogtie’ Fredy to the Ancient Mariner and Odysseus simply because the main character is a sailor.
While such a long narrative poem is daunting to many readers, Fredy Neptune is really a fast-paced adventure story of the best sort—thrilling and meaningful at once. Deliberately cast in non-literary language, this is, nonetheless, a literary masterpiece from one of Australia’s greatest living poets. First published in 1998, it has now been re-released—and I hope this time to as much acclaim in Australian literary circles as it has received abroad.
April 20, 2015
I mean, you are honoured. Someone offers you their life,An Australian seaman witnesses a group of women being burned alive during the Armenian genocide and finds himself completely without sensation, numbed by the horrors he has seen. Thus begins a heroic journey that spans two world wars, exploring themes of racism, alienation, survival, sacrifice, and forgiveness.
because this wasn't an affair that was being offered,
not by her brother. You will see her? he pressed me.
It was awful. Curiosity, and being young then, and dreams
in spite of grey dreadful knowledge. Of being cursed.
Tell her, I said, and walked up and down, tell her,
tell Sha-kira, is it? I mustered it all in my mind,
that I'm honoured. Truly. But I'm leaving. I am a wandering man.
Swashbuckling, haunting, visceral, epic, compassionate, brilliant, fierce.
Highly recommended.
June 18, 2013
Reviewed by Joseph Thompson on CatholicFiction.net:
Fredy Neptune is a novel in verse, written by the acclaimed and prolific Australian poet, Les Murray. It tells the tale of Friedrich Boettcher, a sailor who loses his sense of touch after witnessing women being burnt during the Armenian Genocide while travelling with a German vessel in the First World War. This trauma is a blessing and a curse throughout the rest of the novel as he drifts from job to job, country to country, circumnavigating the globe, attempting to alternately get rid of and live with his “living plaster” body in a world undergoing the cruel changes between the two world wars.
Read more: http://catholicfiction.net/book-revie...
Fredy Neptune is a novel in verse, written by the acclaimed and prolific Australian poet, Les Murray. It tells the tale of Friedrich Boettcher, a sailor who loses his sense of touch after witnessing women being burnt during the Armenian Genocide while travelling with a German vessel in the First World War. This trauma is a blessing and a curse throughout the rest of the novel as he drifts from job to job, country to country, circumnavigating the globe, attempting to alternately get rid of and live with his “living plaster” body in a world undergoing the cruel changes between the two world wars.
Read more: http://catholicfiction.net/book-revie...
July 26, 2007
The fastest-paced historical adventure novel ever. And therefore the best. An Australian sailor of German descent witnesses a war atrocity and as a result, loses all feeling and gains superhuman strength. And has more adventures than Sinbad and Odysseus combined. And sleeps with Marlene Dietrich. And then, just when you think no more can possibly happen, the ending nails you through the heart. And then the final line: there's more in life than can be expressed in language. Yeah, right. (A novel in verse.)
September 7, 2007
SO much good language in this book: "Your face looks to me like the parts of a wet dog." Totally captivating. I don't understand though why it was a novel "in verse" - it's written entirely in prose sentences; they were just broken down to look different. Maybe I just don't understand the form. In any case - excellent. Though the last line I find undermining and empty. Read it for the details.
November 25, 2013
It's a novel, it's poetry, it's history, it will force you to get a dictionary to understand Aussie english, ..it's just plain kickass.
May 19, 2018
I found this verse novel on a charity table at a community centre, and snapped it up with glee. It's been a long time since I've dipped into Les Murray's poems, but I remain a huge fan. I met him once, at a poetry reading, and to my everlasting regret I grumbled about 2 or 3 poems I didn't like (or perhaps didn't understand) instead of thanking him for the great number which have given me so much pleasure. I have read one other of his verse novels, "The boys who stole the funeral", and enjoyed that, but now have only a hazy recollection of it.
Fredy Neptune is a first-person account of the adventures and misadventures of Friedrich ("Fredy") Boettcher, an Australian farm-boy of German and (this being Les Murray) Roman Catholic parentage, who is caught up, but never as a combatant, in the turmoil of the Great Depression and two world wars. Working on a German merchant steamer in 1914, Fredy is dragooned into shoveling coal to fuel a battle-cruiser which is fleeing British warships ; and the warship is underway before he can disembark. The escape of the warships Breslau and Goeben to neutral Constantinople led ultimately to the entry of the Ottoman Empire into the Great War, and consequently its downfall. It is Fredy's misfortune while in that part of the world to witness a horrific act of genocide against Armenian women, an experience which will affect him throughout most of his life. The moral trauma engenders a peculiar medical condition which you won't find in any clinical textbook. It is a literary device akin to magic realism or the tradition of American comic-book superheroes. Fredy acquires superhuman strength, his wounds heal within minutes, and he lives without sensation in most of his body ; the last of these I am tempted to read as emblematic of clinical depression, of which Murray is a self-acknowledged sufferer, but the super-powers are a little harder to figure out, except that like so many depressives he is at great pains to conceal his condition (even when employed as a circus strongman, billed as Fredy Neptune, he tries to appear comparatively normal). There are elements of the picaresque in this novel, but the label "picaresque novel" doesn't really fit. Fredy is no rogue ; he's a knockabout sort of fellow, but a thoughtful, hard-working, compassionate, and fundamentally decent man who takes to family life, when it comes, willingly and responsibly.
Fredy speaks in a laconic Australian idiom that we don't hear much in cities nowadays, telling his life like a long and intimate yarn :
"On Melbourne Cup day I was in this pub in Lambton
listening to Spearfelt win it, thinking how when I'd first
heard wireless descriptions I'd thought they were directing
the sport, not reporting it, and this big bloke, king of the bar,
straight after the race and all the cheers and swearing, he
got talking arm wrestles."
This demotic language is peppered with vivid and hyperbolic images : he says of a German officer that he is "a colonel buttoned so tight he looked like a scabbard and walked like dividers on a map." ; and he describes an Englishwoman, "who talked in her posh accent, with a sort of mouth-full relish, as if words were chocolates."
Fredy is blown from place to place on the winds of history : the Middle East, Europe, USA, Australia, Papua and New Guinea, and elsewhere. The book covers a lot of history in its 250 pages, and Murray has created more characters than it is easy to keep track of. Fredy encounters ordinary folk in circumstances of extraordinary difficulty, some not so ordinary folk, a few thugs, and even some famous people (Marlene Dietrich introduces him to the poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke). He is neither deferential nor condescending to anyone he meets, whatever their station ; he's a thoroughgoing Australian democrat, and a kind of Everyman trying to survive and make sense of the chaos and tragedy of the times. It has always seemed to me that Murray's Catholicism is fundamentally a deep sense of humanity dressed up in formal attire, and so it is with Fredy who goes to mass occasionally, late in the novel, but in his musings on life, the universe, and everything speaks in terms which require no special indulgence from secular readers. The spirit of the discourse is Christian, but the dogma is absent.
The verse is formatted 8 lines to a stanza, but beyond that it appears to my ignorant eyes as indistinguishable from prose. Many years ago when I was an IT student, I think I would have had little difficulty coding a procedure to turn prose into verses such as this. Maybe Murray's muse refuses to work in conventional prose. The simple verse format did nothing to diminish the pleasure which I had in reading Fredy Neptune, and it would be a pity if it discouraged people who don't feel confident about reading poetry from giving this a try.
Fredy Neptune is a first-person account of the adventures and misadventures of Friedrich ("Fredy") Boettcher, an Australian farm-boy of German and (this being Les Murray) Roman Catholic parentage, who is caught up, but never as a combatant, in the turmoil of the Great Depression and two world wars. Working on a German merchant steamer in 1914, Fredy is dragooned into shoveling coal to fuel a battle-cruiser which is fleeing British warships ; and the warship is underway before he can disembark. The escape of the warships Breslau and Goeben to neutral Constantinople led ultimately to the entry of the Ottoman Empire into the Great War, and consequently its downfall. It is Fredy's misfortune while in that part of the world to witness a horrific act of genocide against Armenian women, an experience which will affect him throughout most of his life. The moral trauma engenders a peculiar medical condition which you won't find in any clinical textbook. It is a literary device akin to magic realism or the tradition of American comic-book superheroes. Fredy acquires superhuman strength, his wounds heal within minutes, and he lives without sensation in most of his body ; the last of these I am tempted to read as emblematic of clinical depression, of which Murray is a self-acknowledged sufferer, but the super-powers are a little harder to figure out, except that like so many depressives he is at great pains to conceal his condition (even when employed as a circus strongman, billed as Fredy Neptune, he tries to appear comparatively normal). There are elements of the picaresque in this novel, but the label "picaresque novel" doesn't really fit. Fredy is no rogue ; he's a knockabout sort of fellow, but a thoughtful, hard-working, compassionate, and fundamentally decent man who takes to family life, when it comes, willingly and responsibly.
Fredy speaks in a laconic Australian idiom that we don't hear much in cities nowadays, telling his life like a long and intimate yarn :
"On Melbourne Cup day I was in this pub in Lambton
listening to Spearfelt win it, thinking how when I'd first
heard wireless descriptions I'd thought they were directing
the sport, not reporting it, and this big bloke, king of the bar,
straight after the race and all the cheers and swearing, he
got talking arm wrestles."
This demotic language is peppered with vivid and hyperbolic images : he says of a German officer that he is "a colonel buttoned so tight he looked like a scabbard and walked like dividers on a map." ; and he describes an Englishwoman, "who talked in her posh accent, with a sort of mouth-full relish, as if words were chocolates."
Fredy is blown from place to place on the winds of history : the Middle East, Europe, USA, Australia, Papua and New Guinea, and elsewhere. The book covers a lot of history in its 250 pages, and Murray has created more characters than it is easy to keep track of. Fredy encounters ordinary folk in circumstances of extraordinary difficulty, some not so ordinary folk, a few thugs, and even some famous people (Marlene Dietrich introduces him to the poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke). He is neither deferential nor condescending to anyone he meets, whatever their station ; he's a thoroughgoing Australian democrat, and a kind of Everyman trying to survive and make sense of the chaos and tragedy of the times. It has always seemed to me that Murray's Catholicism is fundamentally a deep sense of humanity dressed up in formal attire, and so it is with Fredy who goes to mass occasionally, late in the novel, but in his musings on life, the universe, and everything speaks in terms which require no special indulgence from secular readers. The spirit of the discourse is Christian, but the dogma is absent.
The verse is formatted 8 lines to a stanza, but beyond that it appears to my ignorant eyes as indistinguishable from prose. Many years ago when I was an IT student, I think I would have had little difficulty coding a procedure to turn prose into verses such as this. Maybe Murray's muse refuses to work in conventional prose. The simple verse format did nothing to diminish the pleasure which I had in reading Fredy Neptune, and it would be a pity if it discouraged people who don't feel confident about reading poetry from giving this a try.
January 24, 2019
It's easy to follow the general arc of the story, and to understand what happens, but the exact meaning of the words is often beyond my reach (perhaps the vernacular is opaque). Overcoming that challenge, however, presents immeasurable rewards. In 250 pages, Les Murray conjures up an era of world wars and chronicles an unusual character's journey through it. After witnessing a horrendous sight in Turkey during WWI, Fredy Boettcher loses his sense of touch (i.e., he feels no pain) and gains superhuman strength. This physical gift/curse (the I versus the it) follows him across multiple continents and seas, as he fights to return home to his family in Australia. There's really nothing he doesn't do: Fredy's family--Laura, Joe, and Louise--is the pure goodness at his center. Yet Fredy himself is a hero in every sense of the word; he's the narrator, too, which makes it even better. Why verse, you ask? Verse gives this book a sense of weightiness; it elevates a mere story to an epic (cf. Homer, Vergil); it makes the words matter more. Indeed, the language in here should be digested at a thoughtful pace: it is difficult, though wondrously so. Fredy Neptune is a truly singular reading experience: I finished this book surrounded by sparkling, spinning stars.
"Did you ever hear me suck music out the big end of a clarinet?"
"Did you ever hear me suck music out the big end of a clarinet?"
June 24, 2017
The longest poem of the 20th century, and one of the best. I'm not quite sure if it's still the longest Australian poem - I think Homer Rieth may have now claimed that honour (and possibly second place as well), now.
Murray's command of the language is as powerful as in his other works, but here it is stripped down, every sentence driving the work forward, devoid of any of the pretention you often find in a lot of modern poetry. It's both a gripping narrative and a profoundly thoughtful work.
Being a German Australian, I found Fredy Neptune hitting rather close to home now and then. It's an utterly convincingly voice - there's no feeling of a Scots-Australian assuming another's form here.
Verdict: Perhaps the masterwork of Australia's greatest living poet.
Murray's command of the language is as powerful as in his other works, but here it is stripped down, every sentence driving the work forward, devoid of any of the pretention you often find in a lot of modern poetry. It's both a gripping narrative and a profoundly thoughtful work.
Being a German Australian, I found Fredy Neptune hitting rather close to home now and then. It's an utterly convincingly voice - there's no feeling of a Scots-Australian assuming another's form here.
Verdict: Perhaps the masterwork of Australia's greatest living poet.
September 23, 2007
I can't recommend this highly enough.
April 15, 2010
The most brilliant, awe-inspiring meditation on alienation I've ever read.
September 19, 2013
Enjoyed it very much and can remember lines even though I read it 14 years ago (I'm not praising my memory but Murray's language). Tends to become a little boring at times once the WW1 parts are over.
July 26, 2020
I read the first 20 pages or so and decided this book is not for me. So many references and words went over my head and I just didn’t get drawn in by the style or character. Not all brilliant literary achievements are my cup of tea!
December 13, 2009
a great, epic tale told in the much underrated form of the verse novel.
August 18, 2023
Took me a while to get through this one but it was totally worth the difficulties. Such a great story and a really likable set of characters.
The language is completely non-sentimental and blue-collar without being condescending or indulgent. Some reoccurring things that stood out to me was the police, people’s reaction to Freddy’s condition, the role of Christianity, and the role of citizenship.
Truly a fun and rewarding read!
The language is completely non-sentimental and blue-collar without being condescending or indulgent. Some reoccurring things that stood out to me was the police, people’s reaction to Freddy’s condition, the role of Christianity, and the role of citizenship.
Truly a fun and rewarding read!
September 18, 2025
I can't believe I haven't heard of this before; it took a bit to get into, but I loved it. it's so sweeping and ambitious, and the voice is so strong.
January 4, 2022
I really enjoyed reading this book. There are many things in it that are worth pursuing for further study but there are also many things in it that are just funny. One example, from p176
"[... during an altercation with some nazis] _Why did they think_, Sam grinned/
at the teacher and his mother, _that the Superman would be/
one of their kind? Or on their side in anything?_"
Not only funny but profound, and constantly applicable.
"[... during an altercation with some nazis] _Why did they think_, Sam grinned/
at the teacher and his mother, _that the Superman would be/
one of their kind? Or on their side in anything?_"
Not only funny but profound, and constantly applicable.
December 14, 2025
A verse novel where an Australian everyman loses his ability to feel—and somehow still registers more emotion than most modern fiction.
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