In No Church in the Wild, Murray Middleton shines a light on conflicts that define contemporary Australia
- Written by Suzie Gibson, Senior Lecturer in English Literature, Charles Sturt University
Before commencing Murray Middleton’s new novel – the follow-up to his Vogel Award-winning debut When There’s No Where Else to Run (2015) – some readers might be taken aback by the title, which evokes a song of the same name.
The lyrics of No Church in the Wild, which opens Jay-Z and Kanye West’s celebrated 2011 album Watch the Throne, describe struggles between a “mob” and a “king”, and a “king” and a “God”.
Struggle is implicit in a title that opposes a place of worship with a wilderness, invoking the division between the sacred and the profane. Tellingly, though, the church is not in the wild, its absence suggesting that Middleton’s fiction is concerned with things that are missing: tolerance, supportive institutions, shared beliefs, even grace.
Review: No Church in the Wild – Murray Middleton (Picador)
Set in Melbourne, No Church in the Wild chronicles the lives of disadvantaged young immigrants. Three foregrounded institutions – police, education, housing – are all failing the boys at the centre of the novel. Ali, Walid and Tyler live in decaying housing commission towers; they are misunderstood by their teachers and demonised by the authorities.
The novel’s opening scene, not unlike West and Jay-Z’s music, is both memorable and unsettling, depicting a clash between police and African youths:
The cops have been hanging around the flats for months, doing slow circles of the car park in unmarked Holdens, getting Afros to empty their pockets on the half-court…
The scene invokes the infamous Melbourne tower-block lockdown during the height of the COVID pandemic, an episode that sparked a debate over the racial profiling of immigrants. Indeed, racial profiling is threaded through a novel that is deeply concerned with the question of how prejudice colours perception. As an omnipresent force, prejudice is seen to arise, interestingly, from characters’ insecurities, as they forge a sense of self through the denunciation of others.
At the centre of Murray Middleton’s new novel is a dreamlike expedition into the jungles of Kokoda, Papua New Guinea.
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A wilderness of sorrow
Middleton’s use of multiple points of view, modernist in origin, has at least one famous Australian precedent in Randolph Stow’s Visitants (1979), a masterful collage of perspectives that eschews a single dominant narrator.
Middleton may not have quite the same poetic sensibility as Stow, but his prose becomes vibrant and dynamic whenever it is channelled through Tyler’s searing point of view. There are moments of brilliance, such as when a stoned Tyler attends an RSL club and scathingly observes its patrons:
Some seriously old couple have just arrived, wearing clothes from five hundred years ago. The dude’s face is basically halfway between a human and a zombie’s, like a messed-up truth is stuck inside it.
No Church in the Wild is meticulous in its use of slang to evoke its urban milieu. But Middleton’s style can also be oblique and indirect, in way that fits well with his narrative approach:
Paul hurls the pigskin into the air. Kids in red and blue bibs chase it in every direction, misjudging the bobble of the rock-hard turf.
The careful language is at times reminiscent of Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987), which develops a style that inhabits the emotional lives of her protagonists, capturing the horrendous ways in which slavery dehumanised and murdered African Americans, and evoking a wilderness of sorrow that cannot be fathomed or atoned.
A wilderness of sorrow also permeates No Church in the Wild, which is shadowed by injustices and grievances that remain unatoned, including the death of a young African man, who is taken and beaten by police and is later found drowned. It is unclear whether the death is a murder, suicide or an accident.
The uncertainty leaves open the wound of racism. The tragedy becomes one of the many things in the novel left unresolved – a faithful reflection of a reality that is full omissions and injustices (especially when minority deaths in custody are concerned).
No Church in the Wild is a bold novel that crosses cultural and institutional boundaries. It covers much ground in its exploration of key sectors in society that are integral to our wellbeing, yet vulnerable to dysfunction. The scope of Middleton’s imagination is impressive. At times, the execution of his ideas falls short of his ambition, but No Church in the Wild sheds valuable light on contemporary Australia. It prompts readers to question their own ethics and values, especially with respect to the poor, the racially marginalised and the disenfranchised. Such questioning is urgent in Australia, where empathy and compassion so often remain fringe concepts in public debate.
Authors: Suzie Gibson, Senior Lecturer in English Literature, Charles Sturt University
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