Exquisitely sparse, haunting and luminous. Reading No One was an eerie and alienating experience, conjuring up a mind so far from my own and yet, somehow, on some disjointed, lonely plane, someone I could understand only too well.

Shortlisted, with good reason, for the 2020 Miles Franklin Award, Hughes' short novel is a meditation on trauma, loss, identity, and memory. His prose is never difficult, never dense, but one feels a conscious emptiness in the spaces between, in the words unspoken. It is rare to feel both broken and wiser after reading a novel, but this was such an experience for me. ( )

I should begin with a warning. John Hughes has been outed as a serial plagiarist by Anna Verney and Richard Cooke in the March 2023 issue of ‘The Monthly’ periodical: they aver that ‘the volume and nature of his copying seems to have no known precedent in published literature.’ (‘Being John Hughes’: https://www.themonthly.com.au/issue/2023/march/anna-verney-richard-cooke/being-j...

In ‘No One’ (2019) Hughes has appropriated passages without acknowledgement from Patrick Modiano, W G Sebald, Les Murray and testimonies from the ‘Bringing Them Home’ report into the Stolen Generations. This revelation of the ‘patchwriting’ character of ‘No One’ and his other novels has done incalculable harm to Hughes’ once substantial literary reputation.

I read ‘No One’ after Hughes was outed, curious to see what I could make of it. The passages from Modiano and others passed me by; I had read few of the books that Hughes had plagiarized and recognised none of the passages taken from others as disguised in ‘No-One’. But my knowledge of the patchwork character of book made the relationship between the first person narrator, who is never named, and Hughes his creator even more disconnected and discordant.

I suspect that ‘No-One’ will continue to stretch its wings in my memory. On first reading it is a bleak tale of two damaged people and their sexual relationship casually begun and casually ended after an incidental murder and their flight from arrest. These events began 19 years ago when the nameless narrator, driving his battered Volvo late at night in Sydney in the dying years of the 20th century, heard the sound of an impact on the passenger side. Perhaps he felt the thump of it, he isn’t sure. He stops and drives back to look to the point of impact; there is a dent in the side panel, perhaps new, too high for a dog, but no one seems to have been injured. He feels he is being watched and looks up ‘though I knew there was no one there’. As the narrative progresses, ‘no-one’ will become an impalpable but obtrusive presence in the novel, appearing first of all in the epigraph from Homer’s Odyssey after the title page: Polyphemus’ unanswered cry for help, ‘No One is killing me’. The man goes to the nearby Rachel Forster Hospital in search of his possible victim but no one is there who could have been hit by the Volvo. Over ensuing days he returns to the scene of impact and watches the crowds of pedestrians, as if the victim might suddenly materialize from the mass. He follows a young Aboriginal woman, emaciated with a lacework of scars on her face, who recognises him from his visit to the hospital and tells him that he looks lost. They return to her flat in Redfern, in one of the upper floors of a building called Poets Corner. Like the narrator the young woman has no name of her own in the novel: he refers to her only as the Poetess, lending her a name from the place where she lives. The lacework of scars was inflicted by her boyfriend, one of her father’s friends, an older man who had glassed her face a couple of times. During their brief sexual relationship she joins the man in his search for his unknown and probably imaginary victim. Their handbill advertisements for the victim only attract impostors intent on fraud. After several of these encounters the man realises that his guilt is without end. The Poetess tries to reason with him, calling him a ‘guilt addict’ and warning him, without effect, that ‘Guilt’s a fucking vampire’. Her boyfriend returns, glasses her face again and when he attempts to strangle the man she kills him with a kitchen knife. The man wants to go to the police but the girl dissuades him, secure in the knowledge that their identities are unknown and untraceable. They flee to the place of her best memories, the Aboriginal reserve near Taree where she lived as a child, but it is now a deserted ruin. Afterwards, at a roadside milkbar he asks her, ‘What were they called, your people?’ She responds with furious resentment, ‘How the fuck should I know’. Those are her last words to the man. She leaves him to go to the lavatory and does not return.

Nineteen years have passed and the man narrating this bleak tale is now near sixty and in no better shape than he was in the beginning. He searched for the girl after she left him but never found her. He returns at last to the Rachel Morton Hospital which is now just another deserted ruin. His life seems to have been running in reverse since they parted, ‘waiting for things that did not exist’.

It becomes apparent on re-reading that Hughes has written a disenchanted epilogue to the romantic idyll of Lieutenant William Dawes, an astronomer on the First Fleet (1788) and Patyegrang an Aboriginal girl of about 15 who taught him her Eora language. Their fragmentary conversations, taken from Dawes’ Notebooks which are readily available on the internet, are beguiling in their intimacy and intelligence. The man finds the story of Dawes and Pateygrang early in the novel while killing time in the Mitchell Library and relates their conversations verbatim. Hughes is not the first to appropriate the Patyegarang conversations from Dawes' Notebooks. Kate Grenville’s metafiction ‘The Lieutenant’ (2010) tells the story at length. There is no plagiarism on this occasion; Hughes acknowledges his appropriation in preface.

Dawes established his observatory some distance from the main settlement in Sydney Cove, made friends with the local Eora people and began to record their language. Pateygarang was one of his most significant informants. The Notebooks, beginning in late 1790, provide an extensive and sophisticated account of Eora vocabulary and grammar without which the language would have been lost. The conversations between Dawes and Patyegarang seem to have occurred over a period of three months in the following year. Their relationship was intimate and probably sexual. Dawes was compelled to leave the colony at the end of 1791, disgraced by his refusal to participate in reprisal raids against the Eora. His subsequent career, in most accounts of his life, was equally exemplary for his participation in the anti-slavery campaign. Patyegarang disappears from recorded history after her brief sojourn in Dawes’ observatory.

After his exposure as a serial plagiarist Hughes sought to excuse his theft of others’ literary works as instances of ‘literary palimpsest’. The metaphor has no sensible application to his unacknowledged appropriations which no-one noticed until quite some time after his novels achieved local acclaim. The essence of palimpsest is that what was written earlier is not invisible but decipherable beneath a later overwritten text. But the metaphor does have a strangely appropriate application to Hughes’ superimposition of his bleak modern narrative on the colonial idyll of William Dawes and Patyegarang. ( )

I have all sorts of good reasons for reading this novella by Sydney author John Hughes. I have just posted a giveaway for his new book The Dogs, of which I also have my own copy via my subscription to new publishing venture Upswell and (in a rare moment of self-discipline when it comes to the TBR) I thought I ought to read No One first. I've had since it was nominated for the 2020 Miles Franklin. And because it's only 157 pages long, that also makes it a good flag-bearer for Novellas in November, hosted by Cathy at 746 Books. However, now that I've read it, I have another good reason: I think No One is destined to be a classic of Australian literature, and people will be reading it for many, many years to come.

Yes, that's a big call. But Miles Franklin judges aside, there is plenty of other praise for this deceptively simple story.

• Kim at Reading Matters: 'Rich in language, in metaphor and allegories, and told in an episodic, languid and dreamlike fashion, No One is about alienation, belonging and Australian identity;'


• Jack Cameron Stanton at the SMH says it's 'about the fractured identity of Australian society, delivered with an allegorist’s sensibility;'


• Christine Kearney at the Canberra Times calls it haunting and masterly;

and, comparing Hughes to the 2014 Nobel prize winning author Patrick Modiano,

• George Kouvaros at the Sydney review of Books: 'The capacity of the past to return in a manner that unravels our place in the present links No One to the work of perhaps the greatest living novella writer, Patrick Modiano.'

And that's just the reviews that weren't behind the paywall...

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2021/09/15/no-one-by-john-hughes/ ( )