another phrase of her life

By Matthew Condon, The Age

They have been waiting for a long time to ensnare Antonella Gambotto-Burke - other Sydney journalists, that is. It has been reminiscent of the dying character in Hemingway's The Snows of Kilimanjaro: as the great and vulnerable hunter's life ebbs away - who else can you see in your mind's eye but Gregory Peck? - the jackals are yowling in the night, somewhere outside the glow of camp light.

A magazine and newspaper profile writer, Gambotto-Burke's reputation has been built on her dissection of the rich and famous. Her razor eye for the architecture of pretension and her ability to record untidied dialogue, especially the way it can betray the human mind and soul, have made her an object of fear and derision.

To have been "Gambottoed" is to have had a vein opened. Her pieces may catch anything from the whiff of sandshoes to the decoration of your bedroom. Now, having committed the cardinal sin of removing herself from her journalistic colleagues and publishing a (gasp) novel, she is the biggest tin duck in sideshow alley. She is open slather. Her position is not unlike that of one of the deers in the famous Gary Larson cartoon: two deers are chatting about the unusual target-shaped markings on one of their torsos, and the other remarks: "Bummer of a birthmark."

Advance interviews about her novel - The Pure Weight of the Heart - have indicated that the guns are loaded. They reek of Gambottoing Gambotto.

The question that needs to be assessed however, is the novel itself, weighing in at 357 dense pages.

Can Gambotto-Burke the novelist write fiction? The answer is yes.

From the outset, The Pure Weight of the Heart establishes its own rich, often infuriating, often ungraspable, often highly satisfying tone. It is tone that often eludes the first-time novelist.

As Gambotto-Burke writes of the conception of her heroine, Angelica: "Conceived in the honeymoon suite of a hotel run by two penitent French fascists in an algid village near Valgrisanche, I was a child of love and not conjugal duty and thus and only thus, as my father once suggested, were certain 'vital fluids' conferred unto me."

This is a nice start. We are instantly inside the voice of Angelica, our narrator. Gambotto-Burke is steering the ship.

We learn of the tragic death of Angelica's merchant banker father, and the establishment of her wealthy mother, an often hideous, bejewelled gargoyle of terrifying dimensions, amid Sydney's social set.

Angelica's lonely trajectory through young womanhood is set. Gambotto-Burke's depiction of her philanderings among the hopelessly rich are glittering set pieces. The writing is at once repulsive and alluring. It is like being unable to stop staring into the sun when you've been told it damages your eyes.

It is possible, in a thin way, to source Gambotto-Burke's passages on the glamorous to her magazine profiles. But her depiction of the jet set in The Pure Weight of the Heart is far superior to anything she has penned for the press. In the novel, Gambotto-Burke has submersed herself in these scenes, has wriggled beneath the skin, and emerged with a fistful of nicely crafted scenes that depict the fatuousness of our age.

For example, when Angelica removes herself from her mother's overpowering orbit and settles in London, she meets the "urban miniaturist" writer William Grieve. Gambotto-Burke's subsequent picture of the London literary scene is without rival. As for the fop who is William, he is one of the novel's finest cameo creations. "It's not often," he says to the young Angelica, "that one meets one of your calibre at these interminable do's."

From here, Angelica's life becomes a failed quest for true and meaningful love, which is the centre of the maypole that is The Pure Weight of the Heart. There are several lovers, and some juicy sex scenes. But, always, lingering around Gambotto-Burke's words, is a chill fog, an impending grief that is the unspoken voice of our narrator.

En route, we are treated (or made nauseous) by the bit players in the novel's huge sweep: Angelica's grossly troubled brother, her hideous new step-father Aldo, and the intriguing lover Gabriel, with whom Angelica engages in perhaps the only meaningful dialogue in her life.

In the book's final scenes, there are heartbreaking confrontations, particularly between Angelica and her ice-cold mother, and a spectacular dinner party fracas. Ultimately, too, there is self-realisation, and an approach, a pathway, to genuine love.

The Pure Weight of the Heart is not without its flaws. At times, it is possible to get lost in Gambotto-Burke's supremely lush style, her fizzing of ideas. During these moments, the engine of the book occasionally stalls, and the vehicle slows. Some sidetracks are superfluous; others are not.

There is the suspicion, too, that Gambotto-Burke has made the conscious decision to tend towards the opposite of the magazine writing that has made her name: to be floral, where her press work was lean; to embellish rather than pare.

Ultimately, though, this is a novel of courage and high farce. Gambotto-Burke has proved, instantly, that she possesses a style and, with individual styles, reader perserverance is a necessity.

If her pen sketches of the emptiness of high society - despite much of its inherent intelligence and banter - are painful to read, it is surely because she has captured her subjects so well. They are addictive elements to the novel, and one emerges from them covered in the lint of the masochist.

As far as the jackals outside the camp light go, they will (and have) taken to Gambotto-Burke's rump. She has, after all, committed the cardinal sin of leaping out of the pack.

But, as an individual piece of work, removed from Gambotto-Burke's journalistic incarnation and the image of her constructed by the very people she so perfectly X-rays, this is a novel of considerable gusto and daring.

Novelist Irvine Welsh, on his recent trip to Sydney, implored the public to ignore his well-publicised persona and stick to the books. The same advice should be applied to Gambotto-Burke.

Copyright 1998 Matthew Condon