Dodge Rose begins with a death, offstage, of Aunt Dodge. Eliza returns to Sydney from a remote farm to untangle the estate. She meets Max(ine), who is revealed as the book's narrator, a mysterious relative, perhaps an orphan, who lived with the eccentric and decrepit Dodge from the age of 6, before which she has no memories. Eliza's mother is similarly incapable of narrative (affected by illness, her phone calls make no sense). The story is left to the younger generations who scarcely have a clue where to start.
Max’s narrative has privileged access to Eliza’s thoughts and feelings without giving much away about Max herself. In the first half of the book, Max dodges uneasily between the first person singular, and plural (“We were twenty one and halfway into 1982”) and also functions as a third-person authorial voice. She has as shaky a sense of boundaries as she does of her own history, and there is something ambiguous about her, with her deliberately androgynous name, and no hint of the physically female either in Cox’s conjuring of her or in her relationship to Eliza: ”I realised also as if for the first time that in a shallow way I was falling in love and maybe she was too. Maybe it was just beginning to have a friend.”
Max’s narrative constantly shifts: “I haven’t told the half of it,” she says. Denuded of quote marks, question marks, everything is brought into question: dialogue merges into description and sometimes disintegrates into imagery, pure linguistic flashbacks. Take your eye off the page and her phrases truncate, lose their pronouns, mix the written with the spoken, slide into homophones and other books (Cox’s publisher, The Dalkey Archive, compares him to Joyce, and these are all Joycean dodges). And no wonder.
Aunt Dodge "had a nauseating habit of telling stories ... and the more often she told a story the more they slid around". She collected memories – sometimes other people's photo albums – and kept all her clothes since girlhood. Chasing Dodge Rose is chasing a ghost defined by the space it inhabited. The pursuit of a legacy is a reorganisation of memory, sorting the first person from the third via a retrospective, retroactive telling.
People are framed by the objects that survive them. There is little description of bodies, more of the things that surround them, the “fixtures”. “For some reason Dodge had left me with something resembling a respectable vocabulary for materials but if she knew what kind of furniture any of it was she never mentioned it.” There is an awareness of the strangeness of architecture – the latter half of the book is scattered with photos of mysterious unpeopled room sets.
“Then where from here,” Cox’s novel begins. With no final question mark each of these words peels off from the phrase to become a question or a statement in itself: Then. Where. From. Here. Cox asks us questions about where and how we situate ourselves. The story is, of course, a myth of origin, not only of how Aunt Dodge rose (and fell), but of how Australia rose on the back of dodgy credit, leaving in its wake a spew of broken objects and people. Cox tells us that Australia is a country built not from stucco but from the sort of words that make a legal document, and the latter part of the book is gradually flooded by the passages of the official language that occasionally brake through into Max’s narrative.
The problem with “experiment” is that it can sometime recall the experiments of others. As well as Joyce, the second half of the book (Dodge’s own narrative?), strongly reminiscent of Faulkner, provides not so much development as atmosphere. It is the less obviously experimental passages that do the most work, flipping between perspectives and tenses, with a foothold in the present, the conventional, another in mid-air, or in the past, or, even more precariously, the future anterior.
At its best Dodge Rose is a stealth reappraisal of narrative technique, and Cox has created in Max one of the most extraordinary narrative voices I've read this year.
Joanna Walsh is the author of Vertigo. She edits fiction at 3:AM magazine and runs @read_women.
