Australian men and romantic comedy...

In the spirit of the summer holiday (which it is currently, in the Southern Hemisphere) I have recently read not one, but two, romantic comedies by Australian male writers, and (confess to having) thoroughly enjoyed both. One was The Rosie Project by Graeme Simsion, and the other was The Birdwatcher by William McInnes.

Beauty is to be found in the most unlikely of places

The great thing with romance is that it not only forgives, but joyfully celebrates mistakes, awkwardness and misunderstanding based on differences between protagonists. That's where the love comes in.

Where differences involve a man and a woman, it would be easy to slip into unconscious assumptions, hierarchies, or stereotypes regarding male and female thinking and behaviour. Neither of these books does this. What each does, in its own way, is to explore the complexity of relationships between people who are appropriately 'flawed', who are struggling along courageously despite previous setbacks, still seeking happiness in life, and whose characters are all the richer for that.

Human frailty is an important component of the romantic comedy. It provides the comedy part, and the pathos. It provides the feeling that is the heart of the story. In a way, it is the whole point of these stories. Love is stronger and deeper for the incorporation of imperfection, its unconditional acceptance and potential for promoting growth and transformation in the other.

The Rosie Project

This book is about an academic seeking a wife for some particularly rational reasons, one being that happily married men tend to be healthier and liver longer than those who remain single (or divorced). He designs a scientifically valid and reliable questionnaire to capture the information that he considers important in sorting the chaff from the grain. So far, so good - the ideal setup placing him in a position where he can only come undone. He is the perfectly flawed antihero, brilliant at his work, and yet unaware of the most basic of unspoken social understanding - the implication is that he is on the high functioning end of the autism spectrum, without having actually been officially designated as such, or accepted such a label for himself. In a lovely scene where he steps in for a colleague and quickly researches and gives a talk to a group of parents and their children about Asperger's he notices that many of the children are occupying their time productively on their tablet devices while the parents are wasting time sitting or talking.

Along comes Rosie who is everything the questionnaire is designed to filter out, whose chaotic life and artistic sensibilities are set to challenge and grow the hero in ways that would have been impossible had he found his 'perfect match'. Despite himself, our hero Don Tillman finds himself deviating from his central purpose of finding a wife so that he can help Rosie to discover the identity of her father.

That Graeme Simpson pulls off the job of the romantic comedy beautifully is evidenced by the popularity of the book. It is well-paced, amusing, touching, and immaculately structured. The structure impressed me in particular because its evenness and self-control seemed so appropriate for the subject matter.

I hadn't thought through structure in this way before. Perhaps finding the structure for a particular work is often an intuitive thing that many writers do, but the right structure for a novel and the nature of the characters portrayed seems to me to be intimately connected. Having recently read Mudwoman by Joyce Carol Oates and The Broken Book by Susan Johnson the contrast between the free-flowing and at times challenging structures of these two brilliant books (both of which explored characters whose relationship with conventional reality and perception was often tenuous) was particularly marked for me.

In The Rosie Project, in the end love wins out, of course. It's not the perfect, uncomplicated love of the happy ever after fairy-tale, but the real, enduring kind that has already been severely tested and well and truly survived.

I'll be giving my take on the William McInnes novel in a separate post, as this one is getting a bit long. In about a week's time. In the meantime, if you want to check it out have a look at this Radio National interview with the author.