The Monkey's Mask

"I remember when I first read this. It was an incredibly romantic experience; I was with my now husband and a few friends, hiking in Tasmania. This was the one book we had with us, and we read it out loud each night around the campfire. If you’re going to read a novel-in-verse, this is the way to do it. It was fantastic. I love it. It’s a very funny book. It’s a real classic gumshoe book in many ways. A gumshoe is an old fashioned term for a private eye. It’s the classic loner detective with the sexy secretary and a nose for trouble, like Phillip Marlowe or Sam Spade. So we have a private investigator, Jill. She calls herself ‘a butch dyke.’ A father and a mother come to her, saying their young daughter Micky, a university student, has gone missing. Please, will Jill find her? And it evolves like a classic Sam Spade mystery, with the detective going out, talking to people, delving deeper into the machinations of academia and poets—which is just a lovely through-line—and then this fantastic femme fatale figure comes into it as well. It ends up becoming a very steamy lesbian romance along with the investigation. All in poetry, with some really funny little lines. “This sparseness of the writing reminds me of Fred Williams, the Australian landscape painter. You get a sense of the landscape through just a few brushstrokes” One of the reasons I like it is the sparsity of the writing. They way Porter describes people with a little throwaway line, like “pubic-hair beard.” Or there’s a beautiful description of someone tall and pale, “like the kind of pasta you spill on your shirt on a first date.” So descriptive and funny at the same time. This sparseness of the writing really reminds me of Fred Williams, the Australian landscape painter. His paintings are almost monochromatic: there’s just background colour and these little twiggy trees. But you get a sense of the whole landscape through just a few brushstrokes. Dorothy Porter does that too. Jill, the PI, doesn’t feel secure in her own intellect. She feels lower class; she feels she needs to somehow make up for the fact that she’s not university-educated. And she’s very much the outsider in this world. We’re not meant to have class in Australia, we’re famously class-less. But this novel says: I think you do. So I like how much it manages to fit into not many pages, not many words. Also, again, that sense of humour, even though it’s a story about a murder. It does, actually. It’s quite simple. You think you’ve worked it out halfway through, but Porter leaves it a little bit up in the air at the end. I really like that sense of things not being quite tied up. It’s not the most complex plot, but if it got more complicated, it probably wouldn’t work in this form. You would get so into trying to work out the whodunnit, and the when, the what time of night, that you’d probably get a little bit lost. So I think the simplicity of it is actually a real boon in this case."