The just-released, novella-length ALP investigation of the party's shocking loss of May's federal election is not, strictly, a work of literary fiction.
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And yet Craig Emerson's and Jay Weatherill's engrossing ''Review of Labor's 2019 Federal Election Campaign'' has some of the gripping, poignant qualities of fine, dark fiction. Your columnist, an avid reader and a girly swot, has read every word of it, sometimes reminded by it of Chekhov and Dostoevsky at their unflinching storytelling best.
And mention of Russian literature moves one to fancy that there is the same irresistible attraction in the ALP family's post-election agonising that Leo Tolstoy stokes for readers in his famous opening words of his novel Anna Karenina.
"All happy families are alike;" Tolstoy diagnoses, "[but] each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."
Who can resist a peeping Tom's stickybeak at the plight of the haggard, despairing ALP family? The ruthless review establishes a new arts/entertainment genre. It is Labor noir.
The review has between its lines the dark depiction of the Labor Party's tragic plight of being a party of reform in a nation of ultra-conservative, greedy, selfish, nervous nellies phobically afraid of change.
Lest I seem to be scoffing, I testify, quickly, that the review is a wonderful and extraordinary composition. It promises to be for yonks God's gift for the study of Australian history and politics. It cries out for adaptation as a major motion picture, and, better still, as an opera
Poignantly, the review is couched as Labor's apology for a failure to properly understand the wonderful Australian people in all their deep and meaningful nuances.
This is poignant because, perhaps instead the Australian people should be apologising to federal Labor for falling so disappointingly short of Labor's idealistic expectations of them, the people.
Between the lines the review drips with disappointment, with Labor true believers' dashed expectations of common Australians' altruism, kindness and nous. The people's Scomo-exploited fears, angers and anxieties get umpteen mentions in the review. But the review never dares to deplore these irrational foibles as the fears of hobgoblins, zombies, UFOs and of one's own shadows a smarter, kinder people should know better than to entertain.
For example the review agonises over how "receptive" some angry and fearful voters in some crucial seats were to suggestions that a Labor government would pass the Medevac Bill resulting in a flood of refugees (lots of them paedophiles, rapists and murderers) who would take up hospital beds at the expense of sick Australians and push poor Australians out of public housing. But how disappointing for a Labor true believer, dreaming of the betterment of mankind, that the Australian people are receptive to such tripe.
One major theme of the review is a recurring apology for Labor having given the dear Australian people far too much policy detail for them, the people, to cope with.
Labor, the review keens, failed to "craft" for the people "a simple narrative" but instead alarmed simpletons with too much policy "complexity". Labor luminaries have since apologised for hitting the people with so much policy "clutter".
Perhaps I am an intellectual snob but during the election campaign to me all this complexity seemed less like clutter than a generous sprinkling of welcome and easily comprehensible facts and ideas. Hearing it all called "clutter" reminds me of Emperor Joseph's complaint to Mozart that his, Mozart's, opera The Marriage of Figaro contains "Far too many notes, Herr Mozart. Far too many notes." For the Emperor, a blockhead, the musical masterpiece was cluttered with notes. In future will Labor's election campaigns be blockhead-tuned?
As well as echoes of great literature in Labor's plight there is in the review's scapegoating of Bill Shorten's "unpopularity" an echo of great painting.
News reports of the Shorten unpopularity finding were often accompanied by unflattering photographs of the unpopular man that made him look eerily like the woebegone goat portrayed in William Holman Hunt's 1856 masterpiece The Scapegoat. The painting illustrates the prophecy in the Book of Leviticus that on the Day of Atonement a goat, representing the sins of the human community, will be driven off into the howling wilderness to mope, alone, ravaged by blame. The relevance of the painting (readers, why not Google it now for a powerful cultural treat?) to today's ALP after Labor's May 18 election Day of Atonement is uncanny.
Although above, carried away, I've compared the extraordinary Labor review to Russian literature I think (getting even more carried away) a better comparison is with the Bayeux Tapestry.
Like the Bayeux wonder (depicting the action-packed times of the Norman invasion of England and woven with that drama still fresh in living minds) Labor's reviewers have woven a scintillating account of some important months in the life of an Australia teeming with the endless varieties of Australian people, Australian voters.
Whether or not the review is ever of any use to the unhappy ALP family it was composed for, it is a ripper snapshot of the anxious Australia of these bewildering, anxious times.