Writing in the Sydney Review of Books in 2020, Sydney novelist Peter Polites reimagines his Greek Australian mother as the mythological figure Medea, a sorceress “who transgressed for love but was never rewarded”. In the same essay, he reveals how his mother never divorced his father (Hercules, “full of rage and letters”) because she feared he would kill their children. Imagining them as figments of myth, where the fates govern destiny, is narratively therapeutic, Polites writes. “It’s better to think of them like this, rather than the facts of it all.”
Fragments of this essay appear in Polites’ third novel, God Forgets About the Poor: a story, on the surface, of a Greek woman named Honoured who migrates to Australia. To anyone, but especially followers of the author’s work, it’s clear the woman is a guise for Polites’ mother, whose various spectres have populated his writing. The novel opens with Honoured’s monologue, hectoring her son about how he can’t keep writing his “gay things” – a nod to Polites’ two prior novels, Down the Hume (2017) and The Pillars (2020) – and should instead write about her. She tells him to “make it magical in the way that artists do”.
In a chapter-long précis, Honoured sketches a life lived: her second world war-era birth and childhood in the Greek island village of Lefkada; her early adulthood and trysts in Athens; her migration to Australia where she marries a volatile man and raises a family in Sydney’s western suburbs. What follows, however – and what encompasses the majority of the novel – is her story told anew: a third-person-shifted tale about the long arm of heritage. These stories taken together, with later chapters from the perspective of her daughter and son (read: Polites), articulate why this book is neither straight fiction nor memoir.
Polites has discussed how splinters of his life have influenced, to various extents, Down the Hume and The Pillars, those suburban-sprawl queer-noirs where the actions of morally ambiguous characters speak to larger subjects of capitalism, addiction and class aspirationalism. But even in this new work, with its implications that it’s cut from life, it would be a mistake to presume it is merely biography plus metaphor. Artists do indeed make it magical, and God Forgets About the Poor is no different. Yes, this is a “love story to a migrant mother”, as the marketing copy quips, but it’s also a writer inhabiting his family in a bid to tease out himself; it’s a myth.
Via this fact-fiction medley, however, Polites reaches beyond just him and his mother: he’s deftly showing us something unique about migrant life in Australia. There are delicate spoors here of magic realism, evoking resonances – as Maxine Beneba Clarke has noted – of the Colombian novelist Gabriel Garcia Márquez, who often blurred myth and reality in his writing. For Márquez, it wasn’t for the sake of mere aesthetics, but to convey the truth of post-colonial life in Latin America: a surreal hybridity born of the mysticism of the continent’s history and the European rationalism of the invaders.
God Forgets About the Poor draws attention to a similar alchemical mix of truths in Australia via its structural ambition and depiction of migrant existence. We find it in the mother’s Medea-esque mysticism amid her home in western Sydney suburbia: “the reading of prophecy coffee cups, how the warbles of a currawong meant death in the community”. And in the acutely rendered melancholia of Polites’ characters, a diasporic nostalgia born of suspension between places. “Migrant stories are broken,” Honoured says to her son at the novel’s beginning. “Some parts in a village where we washed our clothing with soot. Some parts in big cities working factories.”
It’s a shame the novel is marred with flits of expository hedging, Polites’ lapses of faith in his readers’ capacity to grasp unspoken meaning. (We’re smart; we’ll understand that the “pain in her body connected to the pain of her past”!). These moments aren’t too frequent, thankfully. In fact, much of the prose is clear and distinct like a village bell, with Polites’ clinical eye detailing the ancestral hills of Lefkada and Honoured’s embattled marriage with measured care. The novel marks a distinct shift for the author, reflecting his strength in poignancy and quiet, lyrical writing. His recognisable flair isn’t sacrificed, however; it’s still tart and funny.
In that SRB essay, Polites writes: “Mama even says εχουμε γεραση στην χενιτια, we have become old in a foreign land and her story becomes bigger than me, becomes a myth.” But these stories contain further stories still, he artfully shows, Matryoshka dolls of narrative where bedtime myths of Medea and Hercules co-mingle with those we tell of who we are – tales that allow the darker voids of our lives, the facts of it all, to be grappled with. God Forgets About the Poor feels like a culmination; it’s the author’s most striking work yet.
