Fredy the Fearless

Why had I never heard of Les Murray's Fredy Neptune (a novel in verse) until I came across it on one of those favourites lists at amazon.com? Possibly it's simply because I'm very badly informed about what's hot in the world of books, but I have the feeling that this gem has not got anything close to the acclaim it deserves. Written in what seem to be fairly flexible eight-line stanzas, it lurches through the history of the early twentieth century (moving around a fair bit - the Middle East, Australia, the United States, so far, and I'm about two-thirds of the way through) in picaresque fashion, with a curiously engaging hero. He's curious because, for much of the narrative, (1) he lacks all sense of feeling due to a kind of moral shock after witnessing appalling cruelty from his fellow humans (in a sense the whole poem is a meditation upon our species' capacity for cruelty) and (2) he doesn't really have great depths as a character, despite the ruminative nature of the kind of text he's part of. Things, many of them, just seem to keep happening to him, packing the stanzas with events to keep things moving despite the heavily clotted nature of the language they move in. Many sections demand a sustained effort to get through, especially the dialogue-heavy verses, but I had no problem in willingly making that effort, meeting that demand. Quite often I found myself relishing reading back over a few stanzas to get back to my place and feeling the material come alive twice-over in doing so. It helps that I find myself wanting to know, in a simple way, what's going to happen next. And that's what I'll be doing later, before catching up with my beauty sleep. On holiday I was making steady progress through Fredy but on a working day three or four pages is all I can manage, and is really all I want because this poem is too good to be rushed.