 Book Reviews
with Robin Osborne
Three Dog Night
By Peter Goldsworthy
Viking $29.95
 Doctor-turned-acclaimed writer Peter Goldsworthy has woven a gut-wrenching tale about the fragility of love and friendship, and how Australia's central desert is a heart of darkness that beckons lost souls, however erudite those who possessed them while on earth.
The book's ultimately tortured narrator, psychiatrist Martin Blackman, is a long-time expatriate who has returned proudly to Adelaide with his English wife, Lucy, a fellow head-shrinker, with whom he is obsessively, compulsively - his words - in love.
As they drive up into the Adelaide hills, part of his 'introducing Lucy to my larger neighbourhood,' Martin prattles on about his long-ago school and university friend, Felix, whom they will shortly visit in his mountain retreat. A once brilliant surgeon, who left the city to work in Aboriginal communities, his life went to pieces after an error on a young patient resulted in his leaving medicine rather than being disbarred.
During Martin's long absence abroad, Felix has become a shadow of his former self, gone to drink and chain-smoking, and now, as they discover, terminal cancer.
Perhaps more surprisingly, he is rude and hostile towards his old friend.
'To the return of the native,' Felix says, proposing a mock toast to the pair. 'And to his trophy wife.'
When the unusual Aboriginal artefacts in Felix's house catch their eye, they ask their host to tell them about his years in the desert - where a 'three dog night' is a cold one - to which he replies, with bitter irony, 'I was a pig in shit... beatings, clubbings, spearings. Open cranial cavities. Sucking chest wounds...'
Lucy, although challenged, stares back, unfazed: 'She too has a medical degree, and has served time in the blood-splashed trenches of an emergency department.'
The first sign of real trouble comes when Felix, sufficiently rallied to accept a social invitation, asks Martin whether Lucy could accompany him to a College of Surgeons dinner where he is to speak on Aboriginal health.
Martin agrees, as does Lucy, out of sympathy, and within an agonising thirty pages (for both Martin and the reader), the intrigued Englishwoman and the dying surgeon have left together for the central desert where the latter, also accompanied by two elders from his adoptive clan, and finally by Martin himself, will breathe his wheezy, morphine-assisted last at a remote dreaming place of the budgerigar.
As much a study of white meeting black Australia as of jealousy, its ostensible theme, this book lingers powerfully in the mind.
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