Once upon a time education Year 12 was called Leaving Honours. A modern-day verse novel inspired by Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales may prompt memories of that. Back then, English was very much a compulsory pass subject, with one of the exam questions an equally compulsory, strict Chaucer translation.
In just basic translation here, Chaucer, dubbed the father of English Literature, said “Go little book”, as he sent his hopes off with one of his publications.
Valerie Volk’s Passion Play (Wakefield Press, $29.95) parallels Canterbury Tales. Chaucer’s pilgrims were journeying to the shrine of martyred Thomas Becket at Canterbury Cathedral. Author Volk’s modern-day ones are on a four-day coach trip to the German village of Oberammergau for its world-renowned play. Chaucer’s narrator was himself, albeit concealed in certain of his characters. Volk’s narrator is a journalist, also with an otherwise hidden agenda as she listens to the self-revelations of fellow travellers.
Private lives become private no longer as failings and failures are exposed. Skeletons in closets, sex, avarice, ambition, outright crime and more are all put out there for the reader-listener. Such is the stuff of human nature eternal. Seeing into the private spaces of others makes us more comfortable and secure in our own. Chaucer knew it, as do other storytellers. Volk sets out to prove it again, with depth rather than luridness.
By standard disclaimer, the characters and their stories here would be fictitious, but truth is stranger than fiction, as Mark Twain said. Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; truth isn’t.
Passion Play is a big book in both length and merit. In creating it, Volk perhaps reveals herself to be a listener par excellence, attuned to life’s overall tale. From there, with a leading writer’s skills, she has put down divergent stories in a fashion that makes it hard to put down the book itself.
The book is classified by its publisher as fiction, though it is truly a verse novel, and the third of this genre produced by Volk. Even Grimmer Tales, a humour-and-darkness salute to the Brothers Grimm, was the last. Before it was A Promise of Peaches, about a working-class couple taking two World War II refugees into their humble Melbourne home.
In reviewing her work previously, I touched on such recognised Australian verse novel literature as Les Murray’s The Boys Who Stole the Funeral, John Tranter’s The Floor of Heaven, and Dorothy Porter’s El Dorado. Here, those levels are again well and truly reached, as Volk takes this genre for her own.
Volk last month signed a contract with publisher Wakefield Press for a new book, Bystanders, which will be due for publication next year.
