"Tender are the stairs to heaven". That's the name of the piece they see in the NGV:
And it's that kind of local detail - contemporary inner city Melbourne, littered with highly specific references to place as well as a certain associated mode of living for the young - which makes it very difficult, and probably impossible, for me to tell how 'good' Our Magic Hour is; the passing (or not so passing) references to Nicholson, Brunswick, Smith and Gertrude Streets, the view from Ruckers Hill in Northcote, familiar pubs, sharehouse dynamics, the type of music that's always in the air ("an earnest, jangly garage rock that made her sentimental").
But however much I was filling in myself, and however influenced by my own desire to read books set in the Melbourne that I know today, I think that Our Magic Hour is a novel of genuine quality. The writing is simple but unafraid of the descriptive, experiential moment or image; the interactions between the characters feel real, even the ones who are only sketches, passing presences on a few pages here and there; the depiction of Audrey's slump into depression is convincing, including in how it renders the flatness of affect and hollowness that comes with it, layered with the struggle to function day to day.
At the end she came to a great dark room. There was a ladder suspended from the ceiling, made of fibre-optic cables that changed colour. As she got closer, it seemed to stretch impossibly into the sky, and down into the ground. It was dizzying.It's a Yayoi Kusama and one that I know well from when it was last on display, there on the third floor in that stand alone room on the other side of the decorative arts.
Adam was lying on the floor on his stomach like a child. Audrey lay down next to him. The dark, his warm body, the lit ladder reaching into the ceiling, its illusion of bright endlessness. Audrey thought she might cry.
'It's a mirror,' Adam whispered. 'See? There's one at either end.'
Audrey stared at the ladder, watched the colours change until the room around it melted away.
At last Adam stood, and she did too, obediently. It was like swimming up from underwater.
And it's that kind of local detail - contemporary inner city Melbourne, littered with highly specific references to place as well as a certain associated mode of living for the young - which makes it very difficult, and probably impossible, for me to tell how 'good' Our Magic Hour is; the passing (or not so passing) references to Nicholson, Brunswick, Smith and Gertrude Streets, the view from Ruckers Hill in Northcote, familiar pubs, sharehouse dynamics, the type of music that's always in the air ("an earnest, jangly garage rock that made her sentimental").
But however much I was filling in myself, and however influenced by my own desire to read books set in the Melbourne that I know today, I think that Our Magic Hour is a novel of genuine quality. The writing is simple but unafraid of the descriptive, experiential moment or image; the interactions between the characters feel real, even the ones who are only sketches, passing presences on a few pages here and there; the depiction of Audrey's slump into depression is convincing, including in how it renders the flatness of affect and hollowness that comes with it, layered with the struggle to function day to day.
