Nice Try

Nice Try

By Shane Maloney

Text Publishing, 1998. 312 pp., $19.95 (pb)

Review by Phil Shannon

http://www.greenleft.org.au/node/17736

Murray Whelan, senior adviser to the Labor minister for water supply and the arts, is in more trouble than Mandrake again. "En route to a quiet drink in the elegant surrounds of Mietta's Cocktail Lounge" in the fashionable end of Melbourne, Whelan suddenly finds himself "trapped in a giant garbage bin, about to have my features rearranged by a psychopath in a penguin suit".

Having recently discovered gymnasiums along with other "laterally expanding desk-jockeys teetering on the brink of middle age", Whelan had cause to regret that the ex-boyfriend of the gym's aerobics instructor should direct his steroid-deranged aggression against an innocent ministerial adviser.

The hulk is also mixed up in an ancient Cold War vendetta against a visiting International Olympic Committee member who is in Victoria to assess Melbourne's Olympic Bid (MOB) for the 1996 Games.

Since Whelan is on a special MOB assignment to defuse potential opposition to the Olympic Games from Aboriginal activists, their paths are bound to cross later, after the murder of a promising Aboriginal triathlete, with sparks and fists and javelins flying.

With a plot that has more twists than an Olympic gold medal-winning dive from the high platform, the sub-agenda of this third novel by Shane Maloney, the left-wing humorist from Melbourne, is to lament the loss of traditional Labor values, self-inflicted by the party in its mock battle with market forces and corporatism.

Whelan is on Olympic assignment for the minister for sport, recreation, racing and the Olympics, Doug "Woeful" McKenzie (risen to the heights of minister through the "obscure functioning of factional hydraulics"), noted for his woeful kicking as a former full-back for South Melbourne.

Like the club itself, sacrificed on the altar of the corporate dollar, "Woeful" is "a vestige of a vanquished era when the ranks of the Labor Party were filled with such men. Shearers, engine drivers, coal miners. A time that still informed our collective mythology. But a long time gone."

The "Woeful" McKenzies of Whelan's party have now been replaced by careerists and free market ideologues whose passions are stirred by the business opportunities (and re-election prospects) of a successful Olympic bid, more in tune with the men of the incorporated MOB — "business worthies and marketing experts and superannuated sports officials ... men who regarded spending other people's money as their highest public duty".

The jaded Whelan takes a jaundiced view of Victorian Labor, and knows that he himself is afflicted with the disease that is rotting the party. Stumbling across an Aboriginal protest against the games bid, Whelan "knew immediately what I must do. What any reasonable, thinking, politically aware member of the Labor Party would do under the circumstances. I left the scene. Quickly."

Murray Whelan, the decent but bemused knight, suffers much confusion and not a little physical harm as he tackles, or more often is tackled by, indigenous and class issues that are always beyond his control. An apt ALP hero for the times.

Maloney's latest Murray Whelan novel is in fine fettle. If starting to become a little more clichéd, it is still pacey and very funny, liberally sprinkled with similes as sharp as pins, its humour spurred on by a social conscience that survives the mishaps and disappointments of capitalist political and social life at the fag end of the 20th century.