Volltext - ub-dok: der Dokumentenserver der UB Trier - Universität ...

and form a hale and hardy man. The chaotic cyclone of identities into which they tumble
threatens their survival, but once they find the unified eye of the storm they are drawn together
intellectually, physically, emotionally and spiritually in a calm singular force of perspective,
thought and action.
Monkeys in the Dark imposes at its centre—a structural expression of Blanche
d’Alpuget’s distinctive sense of irony—a digression. Veering from a straight novelistic
account of d’Alpuget’s leitmotif of brutalisation, the tale of Alexandra Wheatfield and
Anthony Sinclaire’s journey places the traditional Australian themes of the struggle for identity
and survival in a hostile world into the form of sacred Indian biography. Like Koch’s Kwan
and Hamilton, d’Alpuget’s protagonists are deeply engaged in a struggle for unification of
opposing forces, but d’Alpuget’s Indian model allows her to put them into the context of the
rise and fall of fate and fortune, of the threatening accumulation of karma, and of the sense of
the personal responsibility born by each individual for himself, for his companion, and for the
world he lives in. This borrowed structure imposes symbolic meaning on the usually vacuous
sort of descriptive images found in western novels and which d’Alpuget is so attentive to, as
the colour of a character’s hair, eyes or clothes, his name, his diction, or how he eats. And it
gives decidedly humanising direction, albeit circular rather than the standard linear
development, climax, anti-climax, and denouement, to characters in a plot which would
otherwise be merely an episodic excursion to a dead end.
- 292 -