El Dorado, by Dorothy Porter

You’ve got to admire Dorothy Porter. She’s dragged Australian poetry out of the mannered and self-indulgent murky backrooms of inner-city pubs, and hauled it from the rollicking rhyming outback sheds to make it robust, a vehicle for suspense and stark realism. And she’s an out lesbian.

Her earlier detective novel in verse, The Monkey’s Mask, was hugely admired, made into a gorgeous film (with Susie Porter) is about to be released as a radio play by the BBC and is still making money for Dorothy Porter.

But somehow it doesn’t work for me.

The main theme of El Dorado is friendship, expressed through the unlikely relationship between a boofhead unreconstructed straight male copper (though a single parent) and a lesbian whose work involves creating Hollywood imaginary worlds. I never found this relationship convincing enough – what would have held them together all those years? Why has Cath come back to Melbourne? And while they are searching for the killer, who they dub El Dorado, how is she supporting herself, for goodness sake?

El Dorado is a serial child murderer who smears his victims’ faces with gold, a detail that remains unexplained.

Now, I know that sparseness is the beauty of poetry. It’s as much about what isn’t said as what’s on the page. But my pedestrian mind strays all the time to these pragmatic unanswered questions – and that intrusion spoils it for me.

The most interesting idea in the book is the connection Porter makes between the killer as a homophobic moralistic saviour of the innocence of children, and the contemporary rise of the religious right. I laughed aloud at this section:

If only El Dorado would abstain
from murdering their children
the sex-mad sex-scared
punters
would probably elect him

As a side story, Cath falls in love with Lily, a snake charmer and former sex worker. Cath’s insecurity about the problems of their comparative age and their different histories is well drawn and enjoyable for its ordinariness.

Covers of books are very important to me in setting the tone. This one is very uninspiring, being a photograph of trees and water by Christian Carollo, who, according to the website, works mostly for American organisations on projects called Handbook for Campus Crusade for Christ and Brand my Church. A strange choice. Very likely Dorothy Porter had no influence at all over the cover design.

El Dorado has been on the market for several weeks, and while Dorothy Porter has been extensively interviewed about it (on the ABC Arts show, at Gleebooks) and there are a myriad of published descriptive pieces, there are no critical reviews. Why?
Perhaps because we all admire the project. We all admire the writer. But is that enough?