Albion's Story

Ron Antonucci

As he tells his story, Albion Gidley Singer, perhaps the most loathsome creature in recent fiction, would appear to be a proper if blustering Sydney businessman. A "pillar of the community," he is also a man morbidly afraid and hateful of women. These feelings extend even to his elderly mother, guilty by virtue of possessing that "hidden bit of flesh . . . that swallower of men's organs, that spitter-out of greasy babies." He does, though, relish "feeling a female body writhe like a skewered beetle under" his own and is convinced that the rougher he is, the more they enjoy it. He marries to procreate but soon begins coercing the shop girls at his stationery business into the stockroom, forces relations with his near-retarded maid, and visits a brothel, where the prostitutes make him aware "how little he was appreciated elsewhere." His brutality and sickness reach an apex when he rapes his daughter, Lilian: it was as if "I and myself were blissfully joined." Grenville's ability to get inside this repellent man and still sustain our interest is remarkable. A potentially controversial, painful, yet powerful novel.