Frank Hardy and the Making of Power Without Glory.(Review)

Frank Hardy and the Making of Power Without Glory, by Pauline Armstrong; Melbourne University Press, 2000, $43.95.

TO A CHILD of the late sixties like myself, Power without Glory reads mainly as a period potboiler operating at a fairly low heat. It has the reputation of a novel of interest to political and social historians rather than readers for pleasure. Why did it cause such a fuss back in 19507 How did it manage to achieve the rare distinction of remaining in print for half a century?

Literary controversies usually prove more interesting than the texts that occasion them. The works of Ern Malley, Helen Demidenko and Bob Ellis, for instance, tend to pale beside the excitement aroused by the mere fact of their existence in print. In this case, that would be too harsh a judgment. As rags-to-riches sagas go, Power Without Glory stands up pretty well. It is competently crafted, its pages turn, and it is highly readable. The occasional violent episodes do produce moments of suspense, and Hardy, for the most part, is economical in his interpolation of the factual detail into the fast-paced narrative.

Where the novel is less than convincing is in its lack of a real sense of place, and, most tellingly, in the rather superficial treatment of character. Hardy is not much bothered with his setting, and the reader has to take it for granted that the fictional "Carringbush" is interchangeable with the real-life Collingwood. Although Power Without Glory is one of the best-known novels about Melbourne--along with Fergus Hume's The Mystery of a Hansom Cab and George Johnston's My Brother Jack--Hardy has cursorily sketched rather than comprehensively mapped his part of town.

Certainly he has not tried to do for Melbourne what Joyce did for Edwardian Dublin, nor Dickens Victorian London. Hume, at least, moves his readers through the social scale as he takes them to different parts of the city. Aided by Hume's descriptions, and the buildings that remain standing, it is possible to re-imagine something of the Melbourne of the 1880s. Hardy more or less confines himself to one fairly small, self-contained and socially homogeneous area. Unlike Hume, he is not expressly addressing a non-Melburnian audience. The crucial point, however, is that Hardy nowhere remakes the urban space that is occupied by his imagination.

A more serious problem lies in the characterisation. For all that he was a socialist realist, Hardy resorts far too readily to crude melodrama, particularly in the way he depicts the family life of his protagonist, the robber baron John West, supposedly a portrait of the real-life self-made millionaire John Wren (1871-1953). Hardy the novelist wants his main character to breathe, and struggles with Hardy the propagandist, who desires to destroy him. None of the other characters really stand out; their dialogue is strictly functional and conveys the ideas they are meant to embody rather than any sort of inner life. And of course it is not as if Hardy lacked material.

If ever an Australian historical figure cries out now for consideration as a biographical subject, it is John Wren. Hardy's hostile treatment of him provoked a response in Wren family friend Hugh Buggy's The Real John Wren, which was published in 1977 after the screening of the ABC television serialisation of Power Without Glory. Similarly partisan is John Wren: Gambler, the 1971 biography by Niall Brennan, the son of Wren political protege Frank Brennan and the man who also wrote the authorised life of Archbishop Daniel Mannix, a political ally to Wren. Now that the smoke from this particular battle of the books has cleared, what is needed is an impartial view of this most elusive figure. So far the consideration of Wren's career and reputation has largely been as a consequence or by-product of power struggles within the ALP.