The Protagonist

by Paul Ritchie

219 pages, Hardcover

Published January 1, 1966

About the author

Australian playwright, painter, and novelist.

http://www.independent.co.uk/incoming...

Reviews

[MJ Nicholls · Rating 4 out of 5]

A captivating novel from a forgotten Australian writer. A somnambulistic drifter arrives in a Nothern (English) industrial town, and in his long wait for the returning Irish lodger Hinds, encounters two septuagenarian ex-soldiers and their much younger wives: sexually frustrated Dot, and sexually rapacious Moll. Having seemingly stumbled from a life of some religious persecution, the protagonist (Mr. Honey) is prone to strange religious thoughts, and nodding off even during scenes of wild bacchanal. The novel makes use of free-indirect perspective-hopping (esp. for the bacchanal scene), and for the most part is driven by the amusing and ludicrous dialogue, with some fun moments of playscript fantasy, ecclesiastical symbolism in italics, and a Beckettian sense of life’s often hilarious despair.

[Ronald Morton · Rating 4 out of 5]

Paul Ritchie was an Australian (in exile) painter turned writer whose main literary output all occurred during the 1960’s. From the scant information available it looks like he wrote three books (this one, an earlier one titled The Fallow Season, and a later one “Confessions of a People Lover”). This was his most critically acclaimed work – though the synopsis of People Lover (“central character in [it] is an 80- year-old in an Orwellian futurist world where the permitted lifespan is 70. Bewildered by what he sees around him, he fights for survival and meaning.”) sounds super intriguing.

The Obit that MJ unearthed - here - compares his writing to both Beckett and Kafka; the Beckett comparison works for this book; I’m curious if the Kafka one will be more relevant for one of his other books, as it doesn’t really fit here. Truthfully, I didn’t really feel like the Becket comparison worked through the first half of the book, but as it went along it began to make more sense to me – both in that the ever-forthcoming Hinds had a Waiting for Godot vibe to it; and the increasingly absurdist interactions between the four main characters had a faint Beckett vibe.

Comparisons aside, this is a dark little book that stands on its own merits – similarities to Beckett are just a nice bonus – it’s absurd in just the right way; also there is a fluidity of the perspective in its third person narration that manages to be coldly removed and yet introspective across its main characters in a slightly dizzying but ultimately successful narrative style. Through the work I also couldn’t help but be reminded by a bunch of slightly mean-spirited and lightly absurdist theatre that was being produced around the same time, so I was happy to discover that it was turned into a (somewhat successful) play (“Saint Honey”) following the publication of this book. Two university libraries in the area have a copy of the play, so I’m hopeful that my ILL will come through.