Some readers of Lyrebird Mountain have criticized Jack – the main male character and love interest of the heroine, Anna (I abhor the term “hero”, for women!). They find him weak and despise his stated reason for not returning immediately after the war to the woman he said was the love of his life.
Some have compared him to Heathcliff, possibly because thanks to yet another film of Wuthering Heights that quintessential anti-hero is on everyone’s mind right now. But of course he is not, any more than Anna is like the neurotic Catherine Earnshaw. He is, rather, the kind of man only too common to every age, and one whom women do best to avoid if they are looking for long-term bliss!
Lyrebird Mountain is not the kind of book that states the bleedingly, blindingly obvious. That’s not the kind of writer I am. I like my readers to look at the evidence – in this case letters, diaries, recollections – and make their own deductions about character and motive.
We, the readers, don’t go with Jack to the First World War so we can’t know exactly what he saw, did and suffered. But we do know enough of that terrible conflict to understand its equally terrible psychological effects on the survivors. Men not only lost their lives and limbs, they also lost their minds.
Wilfred Owen, most powerful and uncompromising of the WW1 poets, put it this way:
Happy the soldier home, with not a notion
How somewhere, every dawn, some men attack,
And many sighs are drained.
Happy the lad whose mind was never trained…
But most were trained – and then broken. Well over a century later and with all the benefit of psychology at our command, we, we, too, have been trained to associate shell shock only with those who fought in the trenches. But sailors were sent to the bottom on fiery ships and airmen in their novice planes were shot down and when they were not being shot at they were shooting at other boys.
And Jack, a person of over-tender sensibilities as all artists are, was one of the broken. We don’t know why. Jack didn’t know why and the doctors who treated him, and those like him, didn’t really understand the why of it either. Today we’d be diagnosing PTSD of the most severe kind. Back then, men were told that real men would – and should – just get over it. For Jack, this took a long time and the need to recover all his. By his own admission he started a new life, tried to find a new love. But remained haunted by the old.
And yes, he is selfish, as most artists of true talent are. A brilliant mind is rarely in synch with the sensibilities of others. In order to turn the brilliance into an output that can be shared with the world it’s necessary to focus inward. Early in their love affair it’s obvious to everyone except Anna that Jack has little sympathy for her needs. When she tries to put her strong sense of family and community before his expectation that she attend his exhibition, he is furious with her.
And when they are finally reunited, their senses overwhelmed by passion which seems to be even stronger for having been so long delayed, his self-focus is still evident. He has no understanding of the social and emotional chains that bind Anna to mountain and family, nor does he appear to take any real interest in her art, her work.
So…Jack’s essential sense of self-interest is neither created not modified by his war experience. Yet perhaps we should hesitate to judge him for this for he lives at a time when the needs, demands and expectations of men take precedent over those of women and even those who saw themselves as warriors for social change, and paid lip service to the “liberation” of woman-kind in general continued to treat their own women heedlessly, when viewed with the eye of today.
Think Karl Marx. Think Norman Mailer. Think Pablo Picasso.
The unsolved mystery of Jack’s death is really the heart of the novel and whatever its cause the reader can well assume that, as with so much else in his tragic life, it’s due to his self-willed impetuosity. An arrangement has been made. When it is changed, due probably to Walter’s malice, instead of waiting for Anna to resolve the issue, as only she can really do, he decides to go and fetch her. This might be seen as heroic if we hadn’t come to realise that Jack is a man who acts without thought of the consequences to others. His decision is also one of deliberate provocation to the husband he is cuckolding.
Troubled Jack certainly is, but also devastatingly attractive as such men often are to susceptible women. Otherwise prudent and sensible women. I myself have felt the tug of such attraction and if you are a woman reader so, I bet, have you. There is a part of us that responds, with heart and hormones, to the wild, the wayward, the misfit, the scorner of social norms, even the downright dangerous.
Think James Dean. Think Heathcliff. And, of course, Byron.
Love does not necessarily favour logic. So Anna falls hard and all her strength of character and will cannot defend her against so great a passion for a man who, though he shares it, can never give her anything more. It does, however, help her to endure the agonising loss of him. She does not die of love, nor spend the rest of her life in mourning, though she never allows herself to love so extravagantly again.
I, like so many of my friends, have also endured the loss of the love of my life. And, like so many of my friends – and Anna (who became a friend once I’d created her), I just got on with things. It’s what women do – most of us. And that’s the main theme of Lyrebird Mountain!
Lyrebird Mountain 