Language
The idea that Australian bush writers of the turn of the century were unsophisticated tellers of tales of strong independent men and the submissive women who tolerated is revealed a lie in the imagery of this book. The author reveals an education steeped in the classics throughout and a predilection for endowing even the simplest of descriptive prose with a certain erudite flair that raises it to another level:
“The fore part of the day was altogether devoid of interest or event. Overhead, the sun blazing wastefully and thanklessly through a rarefied atmosphere; underfoot the hot, black clay, thirsting for spring rain, and bare except for inedible roley-poleys, coarse tussocks, and the woody stubble of close-eaten salt-bush; between sky and earth, a solitary wayfarer, wisely lapt in philosophic torpor."
Writing in Allegory
A great deal of the imagery at work in the novel is the result of digressive paragraphs which are composed as metaphorical allegory. The allegorical imagery serves to comment upon the actions which drives the narrative forward, but are also effectively self-contained little metaphysical essays which, even if taken out of context, would be worthy of publication in a volume of their own:
“The misty expanse of Futurity is radiated with divergent lines of rigid steel; and along one of these lines, with diminishing carbon and sighing exhaust, you travel at schedule speed. At each junction, you switch right or left, and on you go still, up or down the way of your own choosing…One line may lead through the Slough of Despond, and the other across the Delectable Mountains, but you don't know whether the section will prove rough or smooth, or whether it ends in a junction or a terminus, till the cloven mists of the Future melt into a manifest Present.”
Character
The lofty language adopted by the author even extends to the simplest of description: that of character. In the hands of Furphy, the delineation of delivers an opportunity to do much more than simply convey the shape of a nose, the thickness of browns, the succulence of a pair of lips. It is an opportunity for penetrating into the very essence of a soul:
“Mary O'Halloran was perfect Young-Australian. To describe her from after-knowledge—she was a very creature of the phenomena which had environed her own dawning intelligence. She was a child of the wilderness, a dryad among her kindred trees. The long-descended poetry of her nature made the bush vocal with pure gladness of life; endowed each tree with sympathy, respondent to her own fellowship.”
More Than a Title
“Such is life” is more than just the title of the novel. It is a recurring expression throughout this long and expansive volume which eventually comes to serve as imagery. The expression is usually voiced in a moment of dashed expectations or failure in a way that demonstrates a sort of rehearsed ironic attempt at embracing a fatalist view toward existence which may not necessarily be representationally accurate:
“It seemed to me that no milder dispensation of Providence would satisfy his moral requirements. Drastic, but such is life.”
“But then, one of the gravest disabilities in the leopard of thirty-five, or thereabout, is connected with the changing of his spots. Such is life.”
