Andrés Vaccari

SMOKY: A TALE OF EXILE AND TERROR

I´ve been awarded an Australia Council grant (New Work, Emerging Writer) to work on this from March to September, 2005.

This is a work of fiction based on my experience as a migrant from Latin America, and on my observations on the experiences of other migrants. It deals broadly with exile and the difficulties of adapting to a new environment. Its central theme is the persistence of the past, and the complexities of coming to terms with painful past experiences in a new country that has no established cultural spaces in which to articulate such alien and traumatic events.

The bulk of the novel is told from the perspective of Ramiro Palissy, an Argentine who arrives in Sydney at the age of five. His parents are escaping the grim dictatorship that seized power in Argentina during the years 1976-1983. In the international media, this period has been known as the Dirty War, and is infamous because of the thousands of people who were ‘disappeared’ under the regime. The Palissy family settle in the outskirts of Sydney (an imaginary suburb called Wovenly) and begin the process of remaking their lives from scratch.

Ramiro is too young to understand the reasons for their resettling or what his parents are going through, and the novel traces his process of awakening; particularly as he reaches puberty and begins to show some curiosity about the history of his mythical country of origin. Ramiro has always had the impression that some sinister unfinished business haunts his parents. What has happened during the Dirty War? His mother is duplicitous with him, and lives in constant fear. His father drinks too much and his dark, immense anger often overwhelms him.

One day, shortly before his tenth birthday, Ramiro is followed by a dog as he comes home from school. The boy and the animal develop a strong bond. As he pleads with his parents to keep the animal, it becomes clear that there’s more to this creature than meets the eye. For a start, his father seems to recognize it.

The arrival of Smoky the dog reconfigures the lives of the Palissy household. As Ramiro grows up and the veil shrouding his family’s secrets begins to tear, Smoky begins to reveal its real side. The poisonous shadows of the past begin to acquire lives of their own.

Shortly after Smoky’s bizarre final escape, the somnolent suburb of Wovenly is rocked by a wave of horrific, puzzling murders. Some of the witnesses even claim that the killer is not human. As the fear spreads and suburbia mutates beyond recognition, Ramiro must act quickly to unravel the true source of the shadowy forces that have been unleashed, before they gather more power and spiral completely out of control.

Stylistically, this work mixes a number of genres; predominantly the personal memoir, the coming of age story, and gothic horror. Its approach can be described as ‘magical realist’, as it interweaves a realist depiction of life in Australian suburbia in the 1980s and early 1990s (a theme with a long-standing tradition in Australian literature) with fantastic turns of events, aiming to capture the psychological drama of exile in an allegorical manner.