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Fredy Neptune: A Novel In Verse

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Amazon.com Review

Despite laudable efforts by Vikram Seth and Anne Carson, the novel in verse isn't exactly a fashionable genre. It seems to promise readers a ripping good yarn, only to bog them down in slant rhymes, enjambments, and other linguistic niceties. Yet even the staunchest fiction fans may find it hard to resist the charms of Les Murray's Fredy Neptune. For one thing, the hero--an Australian itinerant named Friedrich Boettcher--engages in the sort of adventures that are usually reserved for his opposite numbers in prose. Fredy fights aboard a German battleship during World War I, witnesses several of the worst slaughters of our century, and journeys from the Holy Land to Africa to America to the Far East before making a final landfall back in Australia. But Murray's eight-line stanzas are also eminently readable: slangy, swift, and jam-packed with narrative propulsion. Fredy Neptune isn't, it should be said, a mere action movie in verse. After our hero witnesses the genocidal slaughter of some Armenian women, he undergoes a sympathetic reaction that would perplex the likes of Indiana Jones: I was burning in my clothes, sticking to them and ripping free again shedding like a gum tree, and having to hide it and work. What I never expected, when I did stop hurting I wouldn't feel at all. But that's what happened. No pain, nor pleasure. Only a ghost of that sense that tells where the parts of you are.... Detached from human feeling, endowed with superhuman strength, Fredy continues his odyssey, which takes him through so many of the era's premiere trouble spots. At one point he fetches up in Hollywood, serving as "an extra just then for the famous Prussian director / who I thought sounded Australian, when he wasn't talking English." And there he encounters poetry-loving vamp Marlene Dietrich, who sells him once and for all on the merits of Rilke's "The Panther": "It sat me up. This wasn't the Turk's or Thoroblood's 'poems', / big, dangerous, baggy. This was the grain distilled. / This was the sort that might not get men killed." Murray's own poem is too discursive, perhaps, to match Rilke's 86-proof lyricism. But it's plenty big and dangerous, and even in its baggiest moments, Fredy Neptune remains an exhilarating read. --Bob Brandeis

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From Publishers Weekly

Australia's best-known poet has surpassed himself: this entertaining, sprawling, serious novel-in-verse is the best thing Murray (Subhuman Redneck Poems) has written. His expansive, colloquial free verse and eight-line stanzas?sometimes chewily irregular, sometimes conversationally fluent?hide their verbal subtleties in order to hook readers on character and plot. After Freddy Boettcher, an Australian sailor of German descent, sees women burnt alive in Turkey in WWI, he develops psychosomatic leprosy. When he recovers he has gained superstrength but lost his sense of touch. Over the next 30 years he visits (mostly unwillingly) Constantinople, Egypt, Jerusalem, Queensland, Paris, Kentucky, Hollywood, Switzerland, Nazi Germany, Sydney, Shanghai and New Guinea; meets (among others) Lawrence of Arabia, Chaim Weizmann, Marlene Dietrich, the mad-scientist aesthete Basil Thoroblood and the hermaphrodite ex-artilleryman "Leila, now Leland" Golightly; wrestles a "poor opium-mad bear"; inspires the creators of Superman; and becomes a reporter, a circus strongman, a fisherman, a father, a swamp-dredger, a hobo, a movie actor and a Zeppelin crewman, mostly while trying to get home to his wife. Fred's first-person story, "big, dangerous, baggy," makes him a (literally) numb modern Everyman and a spokesman for tough-minded, populist pacifism: "There were no sides for me: both were mine. I'd seen them both." He also defends masculinity, saving a retarded German from castration by bringing him to Australia. If Murray's first verse-novel, The Boys Who Stole the Funeral, struck many readers as sexist, this one will not. Fredy Neptune overflows with story; the roller-coaster stanzas stay clear and memorable: "I leaped up, healthy again, and gravity hung my boots downwards." Murray's deliberately talky, ungainly style can disfigure his shorter poems; it's perfect, though, for this eventful, globe-trotting?and, it turns out, deeply Catholic?modern epic, linked almost equally to Homer's Odyssey, Milton's Paradise Regained and Lucas and Spielberg's Raiders of the Lost Ark. Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product details

Hardcover: 208 pages

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux; First Edition edition (February 17, 1999)

Language: English

ISBN-10: 0374158541

ISBN-13: 978-0374158545

Product Dimensions:

6.1 x 0.6 x 9.2 inches

Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)

Average Customer Review:

4.8 out of 5 stars

12 customer reviews

Amazon Best Sellers Rank:

#1,909,512 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Les Murray is almost certainly the leading poet of Australia. A big, burly, earthy writer, he has a verse novel I'd never heard of and only learned about in a glancing mention in the TLS. Anything by Murray is worth reading, I thought, so I looked it up on Amazon and found it for a penny (plus shipping and handling). Best penny I've ever spent. I'm about a hundred pages intoit, but I'm serenely confident that it's a wonderful poem, a real novel that, in its layout in long relaxed lines, is also a real poem.And above all, it's great fun.

Les Murray has created an unusual "everyman" hero, Fredy Neptune, whose adventures are linked to significant geographies, events, and themes of the last century. He's anything but the "ordinary" sailor we first meet, and subsequently is often perceived to possess superhuman powers. Murray has succeeded in making an epic in verse that's delightfully entertaining, poetic in its language, and completely engaging. If you are put off by the thought of reading a novel in verse, don't be. It's a richly rewarding work that you will greatly enjoy. For those of you who'd like to read a much more detailed review, I suggest Ruth Padel's from the New York Times which you can find using most search engines.

Fredy Neptune is possibly the greatest long work written at the end of the 20th Century (there might be another great long poem from the end of the 20th Century that I don't know about).Though I have the paper version, I wish it were on Kindle so I could easily dip into it any where or any time I feel like it.

Reminds me of the Odyssey in scope, magical qualities....Fredy might be a Marvel Comics anti-hero, but that demeans the author's achievement of poetical narrative .

Superb feat of creative invention that seems more autobiographical than fictional. Mr Murray is clearly one of the great poets of the 20th/21st century.

Bought this book because it was "required" for an English course, but never actually used it in the class. Gotta love those professors. Haven't cracked this book open yet and don't know if I will. The book itself arrived new.

It's tough out there. Don't be fooled; given the chance, our fellow man is a brute with a night stick. Les Murray paints a Hobbesian world and takes the reader on a global ride to prove his point. It begins in Turkey with the sight of women being burned alive and ends in Dresden and Hiroshima. The killing and cruelty never end. Man's senses are geared to sniffing out outsiders and making them sorry they ventured outside their allotted doghouse. At the end of Fredy's odyssey through the twentieth century's killing machine, which includes Europe, America and Asia, we learn that the exploitation of man by man is the only universal worth talking about. Stalinism, Hitlerism and other isms of liberation are just cover for atrocity-making at the hands of goons in the employ of the state. Fredy learns and simultaneously teaches the lessons of the century. It's always better to stay home. This novel in verse is Homeric in every sense of the word; the writing is superb. Murray has all the tools of the English language well in hand; his is a Shakespearean talent, equal to best novelists of our time, with the added genius of the poet. Compression is the key; in the hands of the magical realists this would be a 3000 page, 10-volume monster of unreadable prose. One is dazzled not only by the verbal dexterity and wit, but one basks in the glow of wisdom. Fredy is never taken in by the century's cant; his is an Orwellian cast of mind, always on the alert for words that justify killing. His is a moral conscience equal to our greatest poets: Dante, Goethe, and Shakespeare. What is evil, he asks? He can't say, but he knows it when he sees it.

`Fredy Neptune' is a rare thing. It is one of the great democratic novels of the twentieth century, paralleling `Ulysses' in its sense of the ordinary and reverence for the everyday. And like Joyce's masterpiece, it is Homeric in its sense of suffering, exile and homecoming. Yet the homecoming, in `Fredy Neptune', is more psychological and existential than geographical.The main character, a German Australian sailor witnesses the murder of a group of Armenian women during the Turkish genocide of 1915. He suffers profound moral shock and loses all sense of feeling, both bodily and psychologically. After rescuing a Jewish man and a handicapped boy from Hitler's racial hygiene program, Fredy stumbles across an idea that will heal his fragmented condition; he must `forgive the victim'. Why? This is Murray's response to current ethical imperatives. He can only heal himself, can only return from the traumatic seas of psychic dissociation, if he comes to terms with the voice of conscience. Fredy forgives the victims of history, who include Jews, women and Aborigines, for they linger like a moral irritant in his mind. Once he has forgiven them he begins to `pray with a whole heart' and the process of re-integration with his body begins.Readers interested in Murray's other poetry will find 'Fredy Neptune' is resonant with his collection of autobiographical poetry `Killing the Black Dog', which also contains a revealing essay by the author. The parallels between `Fredy Neptune' and Murray's personal history are illuminating. `Fredy Neptune' is arguably one of the major works of 20c poetry.

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