Nausea

Craig Silvey pleads guilty

Yesterday, the best-selling West Australian author Craig Silvey pleaded guilty to two charges of child exploitation.

I never met Craig Silvey, nor cared for his work, but we shared enough space that his arrest in January on child porn charges stunned me. We’re the same age, from the same city, and once dated the same woman. Many years ago, I’d heard stories about his musical talents – how he was a better musician than he was a writer, the story went, and how he’d once recorded a whole album in his bedroom using kitchen utensils for percussion.

If I remember rightly, and there’s a good chance that I don’t, this crudely recorded but brilliant album was made in the hope of reclaiming a lost love – but was so good that it would, quite likely, alert the country’s music scouts to the presence of a literary Brian Wilson in Freo.

I think the album existed, posted to a lost lover on a thumb-drive, but I never heard it and the suggestion that this precociously successful writer was also modestly withholding a musical genius proved unfounded.

Many claims were made on behalf of Silvey, and well before his fame began attracting absurd comparisons with Mark Twain. He seemed to have a talent for it.

There was another, tenuous tie. One that I can’t remember, but assume existed. Craig Silvey published his first novel, Rhubarb, at the age of 22 with Fremantle Press. I can only imagine that for a year or so in my early twenties I was psychically tethered to Silvey in my jealousy.

I don’t remember much about Rhubarb, other than my contemptuous dismissal of it as a kind of sentimental dough. A judgement borne, no doubt, of envy – but I’d put good money on it still being right.

*

I never thought of Craig Silvey in the following years. I read a few pages of Jasper Jones and was badly irritated – here, I thought, was another hack who’s learnt to commodify sentimentality. Plenty mistook this for genius.

And that was it. I would dearly love this piece to be a forensic dissembling of his work, an exposure of his mediocrity, but I never cared to read most of it. That he sold more than a million books – helped by a now nauseating pivot to the writing of children’s works – was a fact that happily escaped me.

Nor did I notice his elevation as an Australian “Harper Lee”, “genius” and a writer that sat at “the forefront of the next generation of Australian novelists”. I’m finding these encomiums now.

I’m not retrospectively denying my jealousy here. Beyond about the age of 23, none existed. I’d read my portion, and dismissed the cunt as an ambitious mid-brow hack who’d figured how to profitably dramatise white guilt.

Years passed, and I forgot him. It seemed the public didn’t, and films were made and bestselling children’s books made.

*

Upsetting as this is to write, pedos and predators can create great art – my problem here is that a mediocre one was celebrated as a wholesome genius. Of course, no-one is to blame for their support of this guy, nor their enjoyment of his work, but for now I’ll still reserve a kind of weird, righteous nausea at having become a superior writer and one that can write with rare precision about the same kind of abuses he encouraged.

Is this rational? I’m not sure. But I know that while Silvey was writing his best-selling pap, he was doing so performatively – finding a formula while denying obscene facts about himself.

Last September, Guardian Australia profiled Silvey. It was just three months before detectives knocked on his door, and his poor family suddenly entered a new and terrible reality.

Silvey was promoting a new children’s book, and the Guardian’s writer spent time with him in a Freo park in the rain. It’s filled with Silvey’s self-pleased inanities and the writer’s twee detail: Silvey opens a polka-dotted umbrella, before the two dash to a nearby café where everyone knows his name.

Perfect. My returning to thinking about Craig Silvey after many years occurred with this profile. In it, Silvey described his pleasure at becoming the recent father of twins, and how “We have a rapidly expanded family. It’s extraordinary. Our hearts are full. I’m a very devoted and besotted father.”

Having found shelter from the rain, Silvey generously reflected upon the origins of his talents: “Growing up in a timber and orchard town, men tended to exhibit a quiet, consistent and enduring work ethic that was imprinted on me from an early age. It’s lent itself well to the art of crafting novels. I am stubbornly determined, dedicated and patient in my approach to storytelling.”

The profile went on in this vein, faithfully reflecting Silvey’s platitudes while capturing his playfulness with his children – a modest genius and engaged father. “It really changes your brain chemistry, being a parent,” he said. “I’m attuned to the smallest sounds and what they mean.”

Not yet knowing he was a pedo, but having read this profile, I thought to myself: “What a fucking smug mediocrity. This cunt says nothing of insight, but plenty with which to polish his dull public face.”

Was I wrong?

Silvey went on, comfortably opining about fatherhood and low-fame with just the right amount of self-awareness to suggest a well-balanced man, comfortably wearing his gilded status, while saying absolutely nothing of interest. Our pedo was edgeless.

“It’s important that we have reliable, modern, admirable role models for boys to connect to,” he said. “Fathers or men who are connected to families, whether it’s coaches, people in leadership, all that stuff’s really important.”

Yeah, all that stuff’s really important.

Let me say something that risks the same performative inanity of Silvey’s interview: no one else is to blame, and the awesome mediocrity of this cunt wasn’t itself a sign of his deviousness.

But goddamn if there aren’t personal reverberations. And goddamn if this once imagined rival wasn’t another sick fuck – his own conflicts obscured, not revealed, by the shitty art that he made.

There’s a visceral quivering and soul-sickness I find every other day when I encounter yet another headline describing depravity visited upon children. The loose, modest coincidences of our biographies made this one particularly resonant.

I have nothing else to say – and perhaps I’ve said nothing at all. Craig Silvey will likely join his brother in prison, who’s serving time for major fraud, and perhaps another film will one day be made that’s inspired by him. One that will have to be sharply unsentimental.