This genre-bending novel blends mystery, romance and art history

Roaming between Sydney and Hydra, Hill End and Barcelona, London and Paris, Geoffrey Gates’ third novel, The Phantom Surrealist, is a playful search for an elusive Australian artist, Robert J Wake, who grows up on the gritty streets of Surry Hills and ends up on surrealist shores with Miro and Picasso. Soon after, he disappears in Spain.

Playing detective is Christopher Tiffen, a PhD student writing an art history thesis and scrambling for clues on what happened to Wake: Did he go to prison during the Spanish Civil War? Where have his artworks gone? Is he still alive? Any PhD student in writing and literature or art history researcher will get a kick out of Gates’ blurring of genres and Tiffen’s hapless and fantasist attempts to fit his findings into academic parameters when he really wants to explode the narrative. Art lovers will see pointers everywhere to artworks and painters, as Tiffen recognises the brushstrokes of places he visits.

Gates’ fiction is often hilarious and tongue-in-cheek, especially when he relays his unreliable narrator’s penchant for mansplaining thesis ideas to anyone who will (or won’t) listen, including bartenders and sunbaking Dutch tourists. The reader can occasionally feel like someone trapped on an aeroplane next to a passenger who won’t stop talking. Gates is well aware of this, though, and introduces a wonderful parallel narrative where Tiffen falls in love with Agnés, who he meets staring at a painting in a Sydney art gallery. From Barcelona, she works at the Berowra Waters Inn, and Tiffen encircles her in a bid to win her affections; he desperately needs a muse.

This contemporary narrative cleverly echoes Wake’s journey: Wake sailed to pre-World War II London while Tiffen flies into Heathrow; Tiffen works alone in a Kombi Van in Hill End, where Wake painted in an abandoned cottage. Eventually, the narratives have to intersect, and they do in a deus ex machina that seems too insanely neat, but perhaps not for the imaginings of Tiffen; he is searching for “the uncomfortable depths where the fluid truth lies”, after all.

Gates’ central exploration is of fantasy and escape, fakery and the false motivations we project onto others – who we know and who we imagine we know – the stories we make to fill in the gaps when there are no answers. Tiffen is like a phantom in his own life, too, curiously lacking self-awareness. At times the interplay between the parallel narratives seems too delineated. Perhaps more blurring of lines between character, time and space would have kept it aptly surreal and uncertain.

Ultimately, the book is an examination of what tends to fall through the cracks. The painters’ women-lovers who meld into the muse landscape rather than being recognised for their own work and activism. The pre/postwar Australian artists who leave our shores to become key figures in international art scenes but don’t exist in the galleries, catalogues and archives. It’s no surprise that Wake works in the propaganda unit in Spain and the camouflage unit in Australia – where his work is transitory and has no signature. Even Hill End, once thriving but now abandoned, has become the “land of disappearance”.

The Phantom Surrealist is an enticing novel that dissects the narrative of what it means to be an Australian artist like Robert J Wake in the world, and what it takes to find a sense of home. Caught in the tension between knowing everything about art, and not able to express himself as an artist, Tiffen has to make do with losing himself in the imagined lives of others. Gates threads these two characters’ worlds together skilfully, shaping a mysterious ficto-biography of artistic grandeur, that also manages to have a lot of fun along the way.

The Phantom Surrealist by Geoffrey Gates (Transit Lounge, $33), is available now.

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