Beat Not the Bones

by Charlotte Jay

  The white Australians in Beat Not the Bones have attitudes that are chilling forerunners of contemporary racism, be it in South African race relations, the American military’s contempt for the (‘non’) humanity of the Vietnamese, or the ‘ethnic cleansing’ in Croatia/Bosnia-Herzeqovina. As Washington assures Stella ‘(the Papuans) aren’t like other people’, and though he is portrayed as someone who claims to have sympathy for the indigeneous people (‘I like these people and I’m interested in them’), he is the one who provides the facile intellectual rationalisations for the sometime necessity of killing them: ‘… it did not seem to him that the death of a few of them, or even of a whole community greatly mattered. As he saw it, death for them was more natural, more likely, followed more closely and inevitably on the heels of life. Death for a white man was something to shudder at, to resist and protect oneself against. To kill a white man or a white woman was the very last of human acts to be contemplated … But a native was different.’

  Washington is by no means the worst of the whites; Trevor Nyall, head of the administration at Marapai, is the real criminal. He is a chillingly exact portrayal of a bureaucratic type we have come to recognise in many guises since the murderous exactitude of the Nazis’ detailed administrative arrangements for genocide. Stella pins him down totally. ‘He’s a monster … He spills blood by remote control. The whole thing to him was as passionless as algebra … He sits behind his desk and thinks up monstrosities … He’s so clean.’ And we go back ninety years, in memory, to Mister Kurtz’s seventeen page long pamphlet, ‘The Suppression of Savage Customs’, in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.

  As a narrative contribution to the recent history of the South Western Pacific, Beat Not the Bones is probably unique. There are very few fictional representations of New Guinean life. Beatrice Gilmour’s Papua Gold (1912) is a romance novel written from intimate knowledge of the country but, other than Charlotte Jay’s work, we have found no fictional histories. Beat Not the Bones is the first mystery novel set in the region and is the most bold. Charlotte Jay can legitimately be regarded as an unofficial social historian of the region. Her books The Feast of the Dead and The Voice of the Crab (1974) are set in the general south-west Pacific area, more particularly in and around the Trobrian Islands.

  In Beat Not the Bones ‘Marapai’ is Port Moresby and the first half of the book gives a fascinating account of neo-colonial life just after World War II, a portrait of members of white society surviving as best they may in difficult, if exotic, conditions. Jay presents a recognisable ‘human colony’, describing a range of types who variously risked, committed and tried themselves for and against unique surroundings.

  Unusually for a mystery novel to that date, the women are at least as credible personalities as the men. There is Stella who, after a naive introduction, develops and matures into a convincing controller of events; Sylvia, the savvy, faintly disreputable but tough-minded fatalist; the insipid, pathetic, but loyal Janet Nyall. Darker human values are given to the administration men, and the clash between their private greed and the requirements of their daily routines creates mystery and confusion, for Stella in particular.

  The Papuans are minor figures, portrayed as victims of white greed and exploitation, or of well-meaning incompetence. Hitolo is the only ‘developed’ Papuan character. Otherwise they are backdrop to the adventure-search theme, and this is nowhere better illustrated than in the description of the sorcerer, Koibari, whom Washington briefly reruits: ‘“I’m only amusing myself … isn’t he wonderful. Isn’t he superbly and diabolically evil! Look at his little mean red eyes, like a scheming pig”.’ (The full description of the old man has uncanny echoes of H. Rider Haggard’s witch, Gagool, in King Solomon’s Mines.) But, like the jungle itself, native beliefs and white fears of retribution energise the silence in the book – beneath Washington’s swagger dwells terror.

  The jungle and its atmospheres carry the mystery and the real story. What an environment Charlotte Jay has evoked. Just as Stella, like Marlow in Heart of Darkness, feels the ‘attraction of corruption’ (it is one of her links to Philip Washington) and has to puzzle out the murderous corruption at the centre of the search amid the evasions and the obstacles put in her way by the morally raddled officialdom, so we, as readers, are reluctantly attracted to the festering heart of the jungle. It is a background brilliantly fitted to the vicious criminality at the core of the plot.

  In creating this ambience Jay stretches another kind of history, a descriptive natural history of the interior. Readers will have noted with pleasure the descriptions of paw paw trees, mangoes, pandanas, luminous fungi, fig trees, lilies; the riots of colour and clinging vegetation. In this novel the jungle becomes another living thing. It dominates human beings. Stella, who is normal and unafraid ‘felt that the jungle was sleeping and would move, when it wished, beyond the accepted limits of plant life. The huge spreading roots of the trees would stretch and claw in the mud, sucking up some rich, black substance to swell the succulent trunks and the gigantic blades of leaves. Branches would reach out, feeling their way in the air, following scents and sounds, to clutch at the life that moved there.’ And Washington, who is guilt-ridden, confused and terrified, ‘had a sense of something drawing in closer and closer behind him. He did not visualize it as a man … Sometimes he saw it as a shiny substance crawling along the path at his heels. Sometimes the substance was grey, amorphous, writhing; sometimes it had only a hole for a mouth; sometimes a pair of round, lidless eyes … Sometimes there was nothing, only a sense of collected, clotted wind that breathed on the back of his neck.’

  This awful, threatening menace surrounds the story, the search, the environment. When Stella enters the dead village the only living thing is a grotesque, overfed (the implications are horrifying) rat, ‘obese like the sea slug’. This creature could stand as a central symbol for the book, representing disease, death and living corruption.

  PETER MOSS AND MICHAEL J. TOLLEY

  Wakefield Crime Classics

  This series revives forgotten or neglected gems of crime and mystery fiction by Australian authors. Many of the writers have established international reputations but are little known in Australia. In the wake of the excitement generated by the new wave of Australian crime fiction writers, we hope that the achievements of earlier days can be justly celebrated.

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