Saint Antony in His Desert
Ratings1
Average rating4.5
15
Ratings1
Average rating4.5
An ambitious novel of ideas set against a phantasmagoric Sydney. ~J. M. Coetzee A defrocked priest, Antony Elm, has made his way into a desert outside Alice Springs, where he intends to stay for forty days and forty nights. He is undergoing a crisis of faith and has brought with him the typescript for a book he has failed to finish about a meeting between Albert Einstein and the French philosopher Henri Bergson. This story concerns a crisis of understanding, as Bergson confronts Einstein about the meaning of time. On the back of his typescript Antony writes another story, somehow close to his heart, which concerns two young men traveling to Sydney from Canberra for the first time in the early 1980s. This story about a crisis of love takes place in a single night as the boys encounter temptation, damnation, and salvation in the world of alternative music. Antony becomes increasingly delirious, observing temptations of the flesh and spirit, scribbling in the margins of his two unspooling narratives, awaiting a rescue that may or may not come.
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A difficult novel to keep up with. A priest wanders into the desert outside Alice Springs to try to work through his crisis of faith. He starts to write a treatise where he imagines a conversation between two philosophers that he thinks might each have something to say to him.
Alongside that narrative is a story of living a chaotic life in inner city Sydney as a young man, weaving through the various worlds of Redfern's indigenous community, early indy rock concerts and the beginnings of community radio as people try to stake a claim in the local culture.
It reads in part as a personal memoir but uses the priest in the desert to frame a deeper sense of aimlessness and despair. It's not the easiest read but rewards the concentration needed to see it through.
You could probably say this book is set across three timelines, and looking for the parallels between the events in 1922, 1981, and what's close to the present day, gave the story its intrigue. Or that's what I thought, though it's entirely possible I missed the point. Those familiar with the inner suburbs of Sydney, including Redfern, will feel as though they are right amongst the happenings of the 1981 story. 3.5/5 (can't give half star ratings).
