"Australians have only been Australians for a hundred years or so. And before that your family were digging spuds, admit it."
"I admit it with pride."
"I'm sure you do. And I love spuds. When did your lovely great-grandparents turn upside down?"
"Eighteen fifty-four. The gold rush." (NUNC, Ch.19)
Patrick Hanrahan was born in Ballarat, Victoria, Australia. For someone putting together an author page he is something of a problem: he never talks about himself and much less about his private life. We know that he lives in a beautiful old farm mansion somewhere near Rome, has a blond Italian wife, and two Italian sons, and speaks lots of languages, very badly he claims, but one has one's doubts, he can recite poetry in French, and Spanish and has read War and Peace from cover to cover in Russian.
Italian, is the language of his everyday life. There are words from Italian, French, Spanish, Rumanian, Russian, Latin, Greek, and other languages all explained in the text, glossary.
However that he has spent almost all of his adult life in Europe is less
relevant, he claims, than his Ballarat area infancy and childhood. His
ancestors on both sides of his family were involved in the Ballarat Eureka
uprising in 1854 but soon after they settled into a community of highly
orthodox Irish Catholic farmers. Patrick's paternal great-grandfather Michael Hanrahan had travelled from Scalpnagoon Ireland to Australian in 1854 to find Gold. Michael Hanrahan was the leader of the Pikemen at the Eureka Stockade rebellion in 1854.
On his maternal side, his great grand-uncle Michael Tuohy, also travelled from Ireland to find gold. Hanrahan, it would seem, inherited something
of the orthodoxy and something of the rebellion.
This clash is one of the many themes of his four novels. Hanrahan, a victim of
classical education, uses the Latin word, Tunc, meaning Then, for his past
and the Latin word Nunc, meaning Now, for his present. And discovers that, in
his consciousness, one is, to a great extent, merely a mirror of the other.
The novels may have Latin titles, but they are certainly not philosophical
treatises. They are full of the rough and tumble of everyday life, the banter
and tears and laughter, conflict and affection. The challenge is to see the
drama of life here, to make all this the stuff of art. The prose is very close
to conversational language and races along with great verve and energy.
Especially vibrant is the dialogue, where the seriousness of the underlying
themes is almost totally hidden. One can imagine someone reading them merely
as entertainment and one imagines the self-mocking author would have
absolutely no objection to this.
The novels have a very autobiographical feel about them, but in fact they are all fictional. Hanrahan chooses Paris as the background for the present moment, his Nunc, and Rome for an examination of the past moment, his Tunc. He has lived in and loved both cities, but the people of his books who seem so real and the incidents in their lives, are pure invention. He is unashamedly attached to his creations and sees them as breathing people, and not as objects examined with cold scrutiny. The characters are so clear in Hanrahan's mind, that as well as the words they use, he even knows what colours suit their personality. The narrators speak for themselves, not necessarily for him.
For Nunc, the Paris novel, Hanrahan creates a character, Sean Shannon, who
sets out to turn the next three months of his life into the subject matter of
a novel. The important thing here is that ugly tennis-playing. bridge-playing,
beer-drinking, Shannon does not see his life objectively but subjectively. The
people around him can see that he is fighting his way out of a hopeless
relationship with laughing German Frieda and resisting involvement with
pragmatic, poetry-reading Odile, that he is drifting, staying in a tourist
office he hates and refusing any number of activities he would probable enjoy.
They suspect that one day this stubborn refusal to conform, this shaky
freedom, this holiday from reality, will end, or create disaster. There is
possibly a denouement before the end of these three months, neither Shannon
nor the reader knows, but the novel is not about this denouement, it is part
of the moving nunc that is leading the protagonist and the reader, it is about
life while it is being lived and there are no denouements in ongoing life:
I'm going to toss the floating nunc into the air and hold it there forever. (NUNC, Ch.12)
For Tunc, the novel set in Rome, there is not one narrator, but two of them: cosmopolitan Penelope Ryan, born in Boston, daughter of an American father and Italian mother, who has spent most of her childhood in France, and Vaughan Carton, an Australian, who finds himself in Rome more by accident than anything else. Here is a snippet of one late-night conversation:
(Penelope) began to sing in Gregorian chant:
Are we blinder to the tunc than we are to the nunc?
She went on singing it over and over for ages. A comment I made stopped her.
The point is if you want to portray the moment as it moves you can't edit out the blindness The snapshot that moves: a contradiction. (TUNC, Vaughan six)
Penelope, unlike Shannon, is interested in the past moment and interested in recreating it. What she attempts to do is see the past moment with total honesty and without the distraction of present involvement.. She selects perfectly arbitrary moments in her recent past and brings them and their associations to life in words.
She makes various attempts to have Vaughan do the same thing. She wants two versions of a period spent together, neither narrator knowing what the other has written. Vaughan paints and does not think of himself as a writer. He eventually agrees and with some help from his friend in Paris, Sean Shannon, writes his version. The reader might find all this substructure irrelevant; he or she is enthralled by the bizarre nature of the life that these two people are living together and their involvement with the international community that has always thrived in world-weary but pleasure-loving Rome.
INTERIM, which we plan to publish this spring, deals with a critical moment in Vaughan's youth in Melbourne. Hanrahan again hides and has us see the action of this novel through Vaughan's young eyes.
TEMPUS, the novel the author is now working on, brings together the characters and themes of the first three novels. Here the eight members of two families select short periods in the twenty-five years of their life together. We thus have eight narrators and the passing of time, the moments gone forever, is their theme.
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Patrick's novels can be viewed in seven different ways, by a Javascript enabled web browser. Design and colour may vary between different systems. The page layout will change with each stylesheet and the screen will flicker through the stylesheets. Ctrl+9 will return you to this position
The first chapters of each novel can be viewed for your evaluation.
The full webpage of NUNC is a 664 Kb webpage of 93,200 words.
The full webpage of TUNC is a 572 Kb file of 89,402 words.
"He takes an enormous amount of risk, thank Christ," he added. John said, "I was thrilled by it, loved reading it and presumptuously dared feel some reflected pride in your singularly high achievement. To quote John Hanrahan on his school days at St. Michael's Bungaree and afterwards. "Discipline was a subject, I never mastered".
One reader said. "I was agreeably surprised to find the on-line text very readable, especially for dialogue. I also found that when I chose a different format, I took in different details. I thought the versions must have been slightly different from each other, but when I checked I was amazed to find that the texts were identical in everything but format and that I'd simply ignored something in one format that I noticed in another.
© Patrick Hanrahan and Heretic Press 2005
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