Australia's best delivers a paradox of emotions

Below the Styx
by Michael Meehan, Allen and Unwin, $30
This is an extraordinary novel - fascinating but at times frustrating, brilliant but at times boring. Nevertheless, it is well worth reading.
Narrator Martin Frobisher is in jail, charged with the murder of his wife. During his time in the slammer he becomes obsessed with the life and literature of Marcus Clarke, a brilliant but tragic young Englishman, dead for more than a century.
Clarke moved to Australia and later wrote one of the country's classic novels; For the Term of His Natural Life.
Frobisher hires a young researcher, Freda, to bring him whatever she can find by, or about, Clarke.
But as absorbed as he is by Clarke, so too is he disinterested - apparently - in his own fate.
He admits hitting his wife Coralie on the head with a blunt instrument, but denies murdering her.
He calls the police after the assault, as well as the hospital and his sister-in-law and her husband, and retreats to his beach cottage - where police find him.
In between chapters about Clarke, Frobisher describes marriage to wife Coralie, an affair with her sister Madelaine (which he later denies, saying it was platonic), and his frustrating friendship with Madelaine's husband Rollo.
He also hints that Coralie may have been suffocated with a pillow after he had struck her.
But was she? And, if so, by whom? We are not told. Nor are we told what happens to him. Does he get off, or not? These are the frustrations, as is the length of the book, which is just too long for the storyline.
Yet such is the quality of the writing that, for most of the book, reading it is a joy. I have yet to read anything more articulate from an Australian writer.