What Book to Read?

Stealing Picasso (2009) is Cameron’s sixth novel. It is based on a true story. In 1986, Picasso’s painting The Weeping Woman, recently acquired at great expense by the National Gallery of Victoria, was stolen. Responsibility for the theft was claimed by an unknown group calling themselves ‘the Australian Cultural Terrorists’. The painting was recovered unharmed after an anonymous phone call directed police to a locker in Spencer St railway station. No one was ever charged with the theft. Cameron’s version of the story isn’t so much an imaginative recreation – there’s not enough known about what happened for that – but rather a story about what might, if one looked at the world with the satirical eye of Anson Cameron, have happened.

Harry Broome is a student at the (then) National Gallery School of Art, located in the bowels of the NGV. He is over the moon when a beautiful but enigmatic woman who claims to be an art dealer buys all the paintings in his first exhibition. But might there be more to this than an appreciation of his talent?

We know the bones of the story from what really happened and from the prologue, but Cameron clothes them with a manic cast of characters. There is Turton Pym, a teacher at the school, whose real talent is for airbrushing ‘snarling critters and bare-breasted warrior girls’ onto the fuel tanks of bikies’ Harley Davidsons. There are the bikies themselves – the Stinking Pariahs. There is a crooked property developer who glories in being ‘ethically original’, and the bikies’ lawyer who has become wealthy by ‘keeping the underworld periodically outside jail’. ‘To turn up in court with a lesser defender smacks of carelessness and amateurism, and puts you in a class of crook that precludes you from being invited to participate in big operations around town.’ There’s a gay Michael Jackson impersonator. Then there are the Gallery director, and the Minister for the Arts who approved the purchase of the painting in the first place; he is also the Police Minister. And then of course there’s the mysterious Mireille. Cameron weaves them into a clever enough story of counterfeiting and betrayal. We know from the start what happens to the painting; the interest is in how it happens, and what becomes of these larger than life characters.

Cameron has been described as Australia’s ‘leading comic novelist’. He certainly is having a go at almost everyone, even Picasso. The art world is predictably pretentious, more interested in one-upmanship than art. They despise the general public who come to look at the painting – ‘pear-shaped old people smelling of camphor and wearing hand-knitted cardigans’. Under Turton’s pompous direction, the students strive for ‘mutinous creativity’. Harry himself may or may not have talent, but he becomes entranced by (among other things) ‘the lovely laziness of theft as a means of creating art.’ And he bridles at the fact that ‘arts administrators are gorging themselves on great scads of public cash while the artists live like welfare mothers’. Equally predictably, the bikies are over the top. Their president, Bam Hecker, looks like ‘the kind of blue-eyed Aryan that might run a gang in an American prison’. The other bikies can barely put a sentence together, but he is fully articulate. ‘I like Michael Jackson,’ he says. ‘His shame at being a nigger is righteous and his attempt to escape from that predicament has filled me with admiration.’

Whether or not this is actually funny is another matter. Sometimes it is – especially his use of language – but sometimes I just found both characters and action silly. If there is a continuum of humour, from finely tuned irony to foot-in-the-bucket slapstick comedy, this is at the foot-in-the-bucket end. Everyone in the story is a caricature, and most of what they do is over the top – though I have to admit that the original theft by the Australian Cultural Terrorists was pretty over the top too. My problem with satire is that if everyone is self-interested, gullible, stoned or stupid, how are we to regard acts of generosity and friendship, of which there are some in the story? I guess it comes down to personal preference or even mood.

As well as writing novels, Anson Cameron is a columnist for The Age and the Sydney Morning Herald, and writes freelance for other organisations like the ABC and Crikey. Try this – and you’ll see that his heart is in the right place. You can read a bit more about him here.