On stepping aboard the Empress of Australia, the setting for Toby Schmitz’s debut novel, I thought I might be in for a fizzy nautical romp. I rather hoped so. The news, presently, is mostly vile; a parade of cruelty, stupidity and profound, preventable suffering. A jazz age mystery authored by a celebrated Australian actor – you’ll have seen him on mainstages across the country, and recently in the TV adaptation of Boy Swallows Universe – sounded like just the ticket.
In the early chapters of The Empress Murders, we have just one corpse to contend with, and many dazzling characters to follow through the staterooms and corridors of the upper and lower decks. Inspector Archie Daniels, the ship’s detective, seems like a glum chap, Chief Steward Rowling is sweatily unwell, and we learn quickly that Mr Frey, an Australian poet, fought at the Somme and Gallipoli.
But the war is over, it’s 1925, and the Empress has been fitted out with a new cabaret saloon. The passengers are primed to drink and dance and drug their way across the Atlantic. There’s Tony Hertz-Hollingsworth, “sapphire velvet sports coat with plum silk pocket square and matching tie (top button popped), white trousers knifepleated, two-tone wing-tips”. His wife of three weeks, Nicola, spots Frey and squeals “Newcomer!” Everyone is a suspect, no one can escape, the parties simply must continue. Frey is a freeloader, having invited himself to dinner with the Cavendishes; they “really are tall enough to write home about”. Such larks! There might be a murderer aboard, but surely one dead deckhand will not spoil the fun?
As the Empress sails further away from Portsmouth, however, Schmitz confounds expectations. We are no longer in a jolly Agatha Christie novel, but perhaps in a film directed by Sam Peckinpah or Park Chan-wook. The corpses pile up, so many of them that they spill out of the kitchen where Inspector Daniels directs them to be stored. The parties take on a desperate air and the pace of the novel slows.
The violence of the crossing is mirrored by the backstories of the characters, which, as they emerge, form a collage of the waning British Empire and its brutal legacies. Through the lives of the toffs, the musos, the waiters, the bodyguards and sundry passengers and staff, we traverse the Commonwealth and witness dispossession, genocide, enslavement and all manner of violence and hypocrisy, returning again and again to the charnel houses of the Great War. These flashbacks are heavy-going and mighty didactic, as if Schmitz suspects his reader risks – like the cast and crew of the Empress – being so taken with the froth and frocks as to be indifferent to the bloody truths they conceal.
It’s not giving anything away to say that the reader twigs to who is responsible well before the poor old ship’s detective does. We might grasp for a neat motive to explain the crimes but soon enough realise that any such reckoning is inadequate. Schmitz cues us to see the psychotic violence of The Empress Murders not as the work of an individual but as the expression of nothing less than history itself (let the band play on).
The narrative machinery of The Empress Murders is unusual, in that the novel is narrated in part by the boat. The boat-narrator speaks not just in the voice of the Empress of Australia, but an armada of boats. The Empress is a bark canoe, a trireme and an ocean liner, an unsinkable boat with a commanding narrative position. Schmitz uses this device sparingly, staying mostly in a cozy close third and ventriloquising his characters; as boat, he addresses his readers directly.
I’m not sure this very conspicuous narrative device is strictly necessary, but it is a measure of Schmitz’s aesthetic ambitions for his novel, which are aligned with the avant-garde techniques of the first decades of the 20th century. The poet Frey is obsessed with Dada, and so, I think, is Schmitz, whose approach to narrative design rests heavily on jump cuts and collage, on startling juxtapositions and stomach-turning shifts in register.
It is through the boat that Schmitz delivers an ominous thesis about history: “Within my names within names, my kernel has always included Death Barge. Whether you believe in me or not, I’ve always been ready to ferry you to annihilation.” This is no pleasure cruise. By this stage of the novel, the reader has abandoned all hope of returning to the soothing rhythms of the jaunty nautical murder mystery. In terms of genre, we have been blindfolded, spun around three times and given a shot of brandy. Is it farce? Is it genius? Is it a bit? The reader is left with little choice but to stumble on and let the boat do its thing.
Schmitz wants to entertain his readers, and also to provoke them. His characters are delightfully loquacious – ribald wits, most of them – and even the sullen ones are daubed with charisma. What it’s all for is another matter. Is The Empress Murders a pulpit for Schmitz to rail against the abuses of empire past and present – or is it an improv stage? Is it a grand dissertation on history – or an experimental frolic? Are we being instructed to reflect on the past, or to look around at our annihilating present with fresh eyes? The answer to these questions is: all of it, and more.
This is a novel that wants to be everything; it’s stuffed to the gills not just with corpses but with language, with games, with gorgeous costumes and period details. The effect is overwhelming. But as Schmitz and the Dadaists and a thousand cabaret artists know, aesthetic derangement is a fit response – perhaps the only appropriate response – to a senseless and cruel world ferrying itself towards destruction.
The Empress Murders by Toby Schmitz is out now (Allen & Unwin)
