The Diplomat

by Chris Womersley

1991. Fresh out of detox and five years after his involvement in the theft of Picasso's masterpiece The Weeping Woman from the NGV, Edward Degraves - art forger and drug addict - returns to Melbourne for a new start. All he needs to do is make one last visit to The Diplomat, a seedy motel renowned for its drug dealers and eccentrics.

But Edward's new-found sobriety is both a torment and a gift. As he revisits old haunts, he is confronted by reminders of the ruined relationships, a stalled career as an artist and - looming over everything - the death of his beloved wife Gertrude.

Shot through with grief and dark comedy, The Diplomat is a powerful story of love and recovery - and a stark evocation of the fine line between self-destruction and redemption.


Praise for The Diplomat

'This is a gem of a novel, full of all the good stuff - love, art, failure, heartbreak - told in a clear, strong voice brimming with loss and longing. A novel of propulsive storytelling and moving depth.' - Emily Bitto

'Art, addiction and nostalgia swirl in reveries that tie London to Melbourne to the Weeping Woman heist. Edward is so heartbreakingly lost in the everyday, so doomed, that he could have risen from Dostoyevsky. Dark, touching and deeply authentic, this is Womersley at his very best.' - Jock Serong

'Threw me right back into the grimy inner-city Melbourne streets of the early 90s. Wonderful!' - Favel Parrett

'Regret and grief are some bitter pills to try wash down. To write about them with raw tenderness, with all their savage complexity, is mighty. A harsh, brave and necessary addendum to Cairo. Bravo.' - Tim Rogers

'Written close to the bone. I clutched my pearls and then rooted for the protagonist. Both harrowing and wonderful.' - Kid Congo Powers (guitarist, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds)

Genres: Fiction, Novels

175 pages, Kindle Edition

Published June 28, 2022

About the author

Chris Womersley (born 1968 in Melbourne, Victoria) is an Australian author of crime fiction, short stories and poetry. He trained as a radio journalist and has travelled extensively to such places as India, South-East Asia, South America, North America, and West Africa.[1] He currently lives in Melbourne, VIC.

Reviews

[Damo · Rating 4 out of 5]

When I finished Chris Womersley’s novel Cairo, I was left with the feeling that there were some details missing. To be precise, the fate of the art forgers, Edward and Gertrude, who disappeared (along with the money) as soon as it was safe to travel. The Diplomat fills that gap quite admirably with somewhat of a heart-rending story of homecoming.

Taking up the thread of where Cairo left off, the Diplomat covers off in a succinct summary where each of the main players of the earlier heist wound up. It was done in a way that enables the book to be treated as its own stand-alone story yet still providing details that those of who were already invested craved.

Edward Degraves, one of the crew who fled to Europe after being part of the theft and forgery of Picasso’s The Weeping Woman, has returned after 5 years abroad. His wife, and forger, Gertrude, has died from a drug overdose and now Edward is looking to make a fresh start.

To fund that fresh start, he has brought with him a stash of heroin. This is the last of the assets that he and Gertrude earned from their forgery activities and if he can make a sale, he should be able to set himself up for the foreseeable future.

The Diplomat Motel is described as a ‘grungy motel in Acland Street favoured by touring rock bands at the cult end of their careers and tourists who hadn’t done their due diligence’.

This is the agreed upon place where Edward wants to offload his smuggled stash of heroin.

But the heroin sale is merely a sideline to the main event in which Edward operates. Constantly weighed down by grief and bombarded by moments of self-reproach, he proceeds to visit various members of his family. Each of these visits is more awkward and confronting than the last.

The Diplomat is very much a companion piece to the early novel, Cairo. I feel that you'll get more out of this book if you had read Cairo beforehand (well worth the read, by the way). The roles played by Edward and Gertrude in the heist can only truly be appreciated through the full experience of the earlier book.

Otherwise, I can understand readers wondering what the fuss is about and why they should care the slightest in Edward and Gertrude’s fate.

That’s not to say this isn’t a solid story filled with regret and self-recrimination, it’s all of that. But everything is put into a far more meaningful context if you have experienced the 5 year old heist firsthand.

There is a sense of a hangover feel about The Diplomat. Whereas Cairo was charged with the excitement of the art heist and the promise of the life that may come after, in The Diplomat we are treated to the harshness of reality and the cost of rampant drug use.

We also dig deeply into artistic talent, particularly unappreciated artistic talent and the effects it may have on the mind of the artist.

The Diplomat is bleak as it lays bare human frailty. There is an unmistakable sense of the lurking spectre of the piper who is waiting to be paid his terrible toll. For all the pain of loss and growing sense of futility, I enjoyed the richly descriptive nature of Chris Womersley’s writing.

[Rosemary Atwell · Rating 2 out of 5]

Assured, compelling storytelling but there’s something missing. There’s a lack of an overall tightness to the piece, some unimaginative characters coupled with a stereotypical sneering criticism of Australian culture and manners.

Yet Womersley’s Melbourne is wonderfully evoked, with everything that the novel lacks as a whole shimmering with a raw, arid beauty of possibilities. For this alone will I be returning.

[Martin Ramsay · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fitzroy in the'90s...back in the day of the boarding houses and the pubs that catered to the old fellas who lived there. And the junkies. This novel takes on the transient lifestyle of a man with a lot on his mind. A man with a past and not much of a future. His wife is dead and he has been in detox before fleeing a nondescript flat in London with money and dope made by selling a forged painting by an imaginary Polish artist. Art and the life of the artist as opposed to the life of the average suburban family is the focus of this novel which ends in a seedy St Kilda drug bust from which our 'hero' only just manages to escape. Along the way there are some great oneliners. Making his escape back to Fitzroy our 'hero' observes:

"The tram became crowded as we passed through the CBD; families and couples heading to the seaside to enjoy the weather. Prams and backpacks, everyone excited and happy, sustained and flirtatious. I felt like an alien, the rotten tooth in a row of pearly whites." (118)

About his lifestyle our 'hero' contemplates a quote from Plato, "everything that deceives may be said to enchant." And so he and his wife Gertrude deceive the public with their forgeries and their families by hiding their addiction and being less than honest. In a portrait Gertrude paints of a local woman named Maureen, she agrees that the Maureen is an 'enigma' and explains she is "One of history's nameless women. We are merely the mulch that enables our brothers and fathers and husbands to flourish." (129)

The quest for our 'hero' is to piece together the pieces of Gertrude's life for the reader. He says of her forgeries:

"This was one of her stated reasons for remaining clear of the 'artistic fray' and declining to sell work under her real name. Whether she was really honest about this - or it was plain old fear - I was never entirely sure. But there was no doubt about artists and their fragile egos." (132)

[Tundra · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars. Delving into the heroin epidemic of the 90’s this book is propelled by the death of a partner and the disintegration of self worth, memories and a future with possible redemption. Very much a life unravelled story.

[Delcene Jones · Rating 4 out of 5]

A story of the savagery of addiction, love, shit lodes of arty stuff plus a fair wack of grief and fear.

Set in 1980’s Melbourne, London and France with a tad of Berlin focusing on an Australian couple pursuing impossible dreams fuelled by artistic criminal undertakings and extreme drug use.

It was short, sharp and bleak but I enjoyed it.

[Kitty Maloona · Rating 5 out of 5]

An interesting addition to Cairo - I loved Cairo partly because of my vague obsession with the so-named flats which I lusted after as I went past them on the tram - but also because I found the book compellingly written and the characters unexpected; I know criticism was levelled at the 'Englishness' of some of them but why is this a problem? I thought the whole louche vintage decadence-feel set in a familiar Melbourne ambience fascinatingly done.

Anyway, on to The Diplomat and I felt that Womersley has produced a novel even better than Cairo - his prose is so perfectly balanced between description and action; you absorb the colours and sounds and movement of the city without realising it has been described, which is masterly in a writer. Some have spoken of the book as dark and gritty, bleak and tough; I found it more on the side of elegant, melancholic and poignant. I suppose I couldn't help comparing it to Edward St Aubyn's Patrick Melrose novels, where you feel you have been hauled through addiction like a sock through a wringer and had your skin flayed in the process. This book is brilliantly written in a different way; we observe the character from a little distance and feel the sadness without experiencing the withdrawal symptoms.

Five stars because of Womersley's word-perfect prose, the headlong rush of the tale that had me reading just one more page, just one more page ...... the absolutely wonderful, for me, setting of Melbourne and references to places and things that are so integral to the life of someone living here that we feel them like parts of our own bodies and yet he makes us see them again, differently. I had thought Cairo might have been a flash in the pan but The Diplomat shows us that here is a very skilled story-teller with a truly masterly gift with words.

I do hope he writes another Cairo-themed novel or two.

PS: I should add how painfully FUNNY this book was as well. Really, really, intelligently funny.

[Stuart McArthur · Rating 5 out of 5]

gritty and readable

Edward is a self-loathing but superior loser, almost by his own description.

Womersley has his character nailed so thoroughly that it’s a pleasure following his deluded misadventures.

I read about his love for his wife with sadness but no sympathy.

It’s a tale of a self-righteous misfit who sees something noble in his thumbing his nose at a world inhabited by average (read normal) people, and although he hates the conditions of his life, he doesn’t apologise, even to himself, for bringing those conditions on, and in fact wallows in them.

I found the read fascinating for its exploration of nihilism and deadbeatedness, and enjoyable for Womersley's engaging, witty, and intimately clear style.

[Blair · Rating 5 out of 5]

Chris created a Spotify playlist to accompany this novel and it exudes the feel of 90s indie rock, as indicated by the blurbs from Tim Rogers and Kid Congo Powers. It's not actually about the music scene, though, more the drug scene of early 90s Melbourne as Edward Degraves, a character from Chris's earlier novel Cairo, returns to Melbourne and tries to deal with grief and addiction. It's a slender and beautifully judged, melancholy novel.

[Farrells Bookshop · Rating 4 out of 5]

A kind of sequel to 'Cairo,' I can't quite tell if you need to have read that first. None-the-less, a moving book about addictions, grief and redemption set in early 90's Melbourne.

Read by Romy

[Margaret · Rating 4 out of 5]

Dark. The inner thoughts of a broken young man, an artist who has failed himself. Some slim hope. One of those books, about nothing but about everything. All dependent on the quality of the writing.

[Jillwilson · Rating 3 out of 5]

I don’t remember The Diplomat Hotel in Acland St, St Kilda – the Internet indicates that it has been demolished and images are hard to come by. Womersley paints a good description of this place late in this novel when main character Edward visits the hotel to try to sell the largish amount of heroin that he has acquired as a result of selling a fake painting created by his wife Gertrude.

It’s the second novel by Womersley named after a place. His novel Cairo centred around a set of ‘bachelor’ apartments in Fitzroy called “Cairo”. There are some images here https://overland.org.au/2013/10/the-c... and here: https://thedesignfiles.net/2022/03/ar... ‘The Diplomat’ is connected with the novel ‘Cairo’, in which a middle-aged man looks back as his seventeen-year-old self is caught up in the notorious theft of Pablo Picasso’s Weeping Woman from the National Gallery of Victoria by a group of bohemian artists.. Edward was one of the conspirators in the art heist before he and Gertude escaped to London. The Diplomat is less a sequel to that novel than a coda.

Womersley writes about place really well. This novel is set in the early 1990s and most of the action takes place ion inner city Melbourne. I could see and smell the streets of Brunswick where Edward and after his flight home from England. One reviewer notes: “Womersley has a gift for atmospheric settings, and his Melbourne circa 1991 is quietly feral and lightly but evocatively drawn. In their Gen X heyday, Brunswick, Fitzroy and St Kilda have a down-and-out energy, a whiff of rot and failure. Visiting recently, I noticed that something of that grim 1990s energy has returned to parts of the city, as if, left alone during lockdown, it has reverted to some weedier nature.” (https://www.australianbookreview.com....)

It’s not really a spoiler to say that Gertrude has died of a drug overdose and Edward is trying to stay clean while immersed in grief about her death and what they did with their lives. It’s interesting that one of the most recent books I read was called “Expectation” and it revolved around three women coming to terms with their thirty something selves. Edward is thirty seven and going through the same process though the bar is much grimmer because he is fighting addiction. The opening sentence gives a flavour: ““Hopefully the worst was behind me: detox, collecting Gertrude’s ashes, London, the twenty-four-hour flight, aeroplane food, customs, sniffer dogs. All I had to do now was survive the rest of my life. Which was no small order, of course.” The phrase Edward remembers from French lessons permeates the novel. It is l’appel du vide. The call of the void. From a nother reviewer: “There are happy moments but the emphasis is on the horror of the feeling of helplessness because what has happened is immutable. No amount of regret, self-loathing or apology will remedy it. Nor will anything ameliorate the self-loathing that comes from disaster mainly self-inflicted.” (https://www.artshub.com.au/news/revie...)

A quibble – he is great at writing about place but some of the dialogue is pretty ponderous.
This comment sums up the novel quite well. “Through Edward’s eyes you also get glimpses of the very talented Gertrude and come to wonder whether they dragged each other down or held each other up, whether they brought the best or the worst out in each other. It leaves the reader to make their own assessment, content with showing glimpses of lives lived in certain ways absent of value judgements.” (https://www.artshub.com.au/news/revie...)

For me it was quite a tense read. Nothing is easy for Edward because like many addicts, he has trashed a lot of relationships and people are wary. His body is not in good shape. He is living in the liminal zone between his former life and another kind of life that needs to be created. But he is not consistently filled with pity. Here he is after visiting a brothel, despising himself for it and imagining the prostitute’s other customers: “There was always someone worse than you in the world, wasn’t there? Although I was unsure whether this was cause for celebration or despair.” I was left wanted a bit more – the novel is done with a light touch – more impressionist than Van Gogh or Ben Quilty. I felt like it got wound up too soon. I was left wanting more.

[Susan Wishart · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not my usual genre but after reading this excellent book by an Australian writer I'll definitely read more of his work. Set in inner city Melbourne, the protagonist, Edward de Graves, is a young would be painter who left for England about a decade previously with his girlfriend Gertrude, also an artist. Full of young optimism they planned to make a big splash in the art world. Increasingly heavy drug use coincided with a slide into day to day need to fund their habit and led to Gertrude painting and selling forgeries and the works of an invented European artist to fund their habit.
Predictably Edward was arrested and sent straight to a compulsory de-tox unit. Only days later Gertrude is found dead from an overdose and Edward is released to retrieve her ashes and leave the country immediately.
His return to his home town, Melbourne, grieving and yearning to kick the drugs, he plans to sell the high grade heroin hidden inside Gertrude's ashes to fund a new start. To do this he has to visit a known buyer located in the seedy hotel called "The Diplomat"where things don't go according to plan!
The appeal of this novel is the highly insightful and devastating characterisation of life as an addict., however the hope of redemption, the fight for sobriety and the guilt and grief over Gertrude's death are leavened by gentle humour. I really enjoyed this book.

[lyny · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a follow-up to Cairo, a fictional re-creation of the Weeping Woman Picasso heist from the NGV in Melbourne. In my notes on that book I wrote: 'It was somewhat old-fashioned in style, and in between being an interesting crime story, and an interesting young man and bohemian life in the 1980s story – quite interesting but not compelling'. Unfortunately this one is more of the same – but minus the crime narrative interest! Wolmersley is a good descriptive writer, and captures well the Melbourne locations as well as the angst and ennui of the male central character Edward – this time returning from London, trying to dry out, after his partner Gertrude has died of an overdose while he was incarcerated in rehab. Edward is desultorily reconnecting with Gertrude’s family and his own father, while trying to avoid other people he knows, and also trying to sell a final stash of drugs he recovered from Gertrude’s flat. There is a smidgen of suspense in relation to this latter story – though somewhat repeating an incident from Cairo. But the book needs a better or more interesting story to hang the observations and character study on.

[Rachel Bookish · Rating 4 out of 5]

Set in Melbourne, in 1991, The Diplomat is a portrait of a man grieving the death of his wife. The story follows a character from a previous book by Womersley, Cairo, and is written with honesty, a big heart and humour. This is a world of drug taking and art forgery, but the character's grief and regret, and general existential yearning is very relatable. I very much enjoyed this.

[Amanda B · Rating 5 out of 5]

It’s been a while since I read a book in one sitting, but that’s what The Diplomat made me do on a cold, overcast Melbourne Sunday. I loved Cairo, and while The Diplomat is much darker and bleaker, it nonetheless nostalgically transported me back to a Melbourne that I loved. The character of Edward is sliced open in The Diplomat and his is a life lived but regretted, caught up in his excesses and addictions. Beautifully written, I savored each line. Like others, I’m now re-reading Cairo.

[Dani Netherclift · Rating 5 out of 5]

A more than worthy follow-up to Cairo but works just as well as a stand-alone. The prose is beautifully written with a tenderness that belies even the grimmest of circumstances. It's also a scratched-record love song to a certain time and place that is incredibly evocative to all that is lost. One of the best reads I have bought this year.

[Niki E · Rating 3 out of 5]

Womersley’s strength is in his descriptions of place, locations, atmosphere; I was in high school during the time this is set but there’s so much about Fitzroy and St Kilda I recognise. However, his writing also highlights how difficult it is to write convincing dialogue; his feels stilted and clumsy in comparison with his descriptive writing.

[Jesse Lee · Rating 5 out of 5]

Such a beautiful story about mistakes, death and loneliness. I really felt this characters emotions and found it effortless to read. There was something so inspiring yet saddening about that feeling of being lost in the world. Watching as circumstances pushed Edward to the edges of society and away from those he loved. A beautiful book.

[Jane · Rating 5 out of 5]

Just wow. A few hours very well spent on the Sunday afternoon of a Melbourne weekend. I feel like Edward and Gertrude were parallel lives to my own in London and Melbourne in the early 90s. Time to reread Cairo and dip into the 7 hour playlist.

[Caroline Poole · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this, it made me remember Cairo too which I also loved. I do think The Diplomat should be read after reading Cairo, you then have the history, the long journey to reflect on. Beautiful writing, you see the cities, you feel the weather and you struggle with the characters!

[Ann Graham · Rating 3 out of 5]

A story of a drug addicted wannabe artist who loses his wife & is robbed of everything he owns, only to return to his homeland, Australia. His useless, hopeless, wasted life just made me feel sad. Something missing in this story.

[Gavan · Rating 4 out of 5]

A quick & entertaining blast through a week in 1991 Melbourne. The story of a reforming drug addict returning from England to pass on the ashes of his wife to her family & sell off the heroin he also brought back. Name checks all the right bands, venues, etc. My only criticism is that it has been a while since I read the preceding book, "Cairo", so can't remember all the characters & events that well (& I think it would have helped in reading this). But highly recommend.

[Ailish B · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is bleak, I don't even know why i purchased it. Maybe the reference to Melbourne. I liked the authors writing style, the descriptions of the paintings, and the conversation with his dad about grief was comforting.

[Brenda Rosser]

scary stunning

[Lois Regardless · Rating 4 out of 5]

Cliched, stereotyped, brilliantly entertaining, enthralling pace and voice. Perfect for a Friday night with a bottle of red wine.

[Loki · Rating 4 out of 5]

Short but very good Australian novel about a man coming back to Melbourne after losing everything, and trying to pick up the pieces. Another great read from Womersley

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

Much deeper than Cairo some interesting introspection. Page 113 very touching. ‘You never know when the final goodbye will come’ wonderful line. Bit with his dad is good v good.

[Nickola · Rating 4 out of 5]

I didn't realise until I had nearly finished the book the this was a sequel, however it was still great and made sense as a stand alone. Well written, engaging plot.

[Tam · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5

[Lola Gray · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really good and sad and pretentious.