FULL REVIEW

One day in 1914, the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa sat down - or rather stood up, at a chest of drawers - and wrote 30 poems. They spoke in a clear voice that sprang from a fully realised persona, or heteronym, whom he called Alberto Caeiro.

Pessoa went on to create more than 70 other heteronyms. But he never attempted to deceive, unlike the perpetrators of the "Ern Malley" literary hoax. This avant-garde poet was created by two Australians in the 1940s, to expose the gullibility and pretension of Sydney's literary critics.

Pessoa is a real poet, and the "Ern Malley" hoax really happened. I Googled them to make sure. This book keeps you searching.

This is because Martin Edmond is drawn to the space between truth and lies: in literature, in history, in the lives of the people he knew in Sydney. He tells the story of his friend Steve, for example, who encouraged his wife and the author to have an affair - though Steve was neither a voyeur, nor a pimp.

Oddest of all are Edmond's descriptions of the heroin-fuelled weddings he used to attend, between Australian girls and Chinese men in need of visas. Their motives were at least explicable, but what about the miracles and hallucinations associated with Our Lady of Fatima, and the three secrets she left with the children she revealed Herself to?

Reading this book is like listening to someone whose companionable, open-ended stories are absorbing yet elusive: you must make of them what you will.

What particularly intrigues Edmond is early Australian history.

In 1628, the Batavia, a ship of the Dutch East India Company bound for Jakarta, ran aground 40 miles off the western coast of Australia. The story of the survivors resembles Lord of the Flies. Were these Dutch men and women the first Europeans to reach Australia?

Edmond's hunch is that Europeans had already found the continent a few years earlier.

His version begins in the early 15th century, with a Malay-Portuguese cartographer named Manoel da Eredia. Eredia had spent his life mapping and describing the Indonesian archipelago, and was convinced that to the south lay Luca Antara, an island rich in gold and sandalwood.

Though desperate to find it, Eredia was detained in Malacca by the Dutch. So he charged his servant, Antonio da Nova, to undertake the journey and report on whether or not Luca Antara existed.

Da Nova obeyed, and wrote a brief letter to his master to confirm that he had reached his objective. So states an appendix to Eredia's Description of Malacca, Meridional India and Cathay (Goa, 1613; Kuala Lumpur, 1930).

The question that obsessed Edmond was, did a longer account of da Nova's journey exist?

He tracked down a reclusive Malayan scholar called Henry Klang, who claimed to have found the only copy of da Nova's odyssey, and although it was not in his possession, he had made an abstract of it. Apparently Klang was willing to let Edmond publish the abstract, which appears in full in this book.

Da Nova's adventure, undertaken in 1610, tells of being stranded on what he thinks must be a vast landmass. Here he senses the presence of a hidden ancient civilisation, and is led north by a nearly naked black man who guides him back to the edge of the modern world: a squalid settlement of miserable castaways and exiles.

Was Edmond the author of Da Nova's journey, using the heteronym of Henry Klang? Is it one of those "beautiful lies"? I think so.

This book is charged with the awareness that history is more than a series of facts laid out in the right order. It is also made up of many-layered stories that will change according to who is telling and who is listening.

The scholar in him goes with a far more playful intelligence, which is willing to poke fun at any literary language that takes itself too seriously.

One of the many joys of this book is that it challenges your abilities as a reader. As the author said of Edward Robarts, whose Marquesan Journal appeared in the 1820s, "he is trustworthy, once you know who you are reading".

Artemis Cooper

Daily Telegraph

FULL REVIEW

A man walks into a Sydney bookshop and buys some books on the Pacific Islands, his area of interest. On subsequent visits he gets to know the owner and is encouraged to start up a relationship with the owner's wife. This takes place in the back of another shop run by the wife. Sex is unrestrained but depersonalised, which seems to suit both of them. The wife wants no ties. 'You can choke on the past or you can let it open put into the future.' But after a while the man, our author, wants to know more about her. She resists and their liaison collapses. This reads like a true story, and may well have been. The author, Martin Edmond, keeps us guessing, and this links in with the nature of much of this book.

Edmond is a searcher, an investigator of people and events that are open to interpretation. He defines himself as a quest junkie. 'Without quest I become dangerous both to myself and others; without quest I am prey to ennui, self-loathing and worse.' He takes us on a variety of quests in this book, mostly linked to Australia. The Ern Malley hoax is addressed - a Modernist poet of that name was invented by two real-life Australian Poets, James McAuley and Harold Stewart. The Fátima apparitions are also examined, along with the third secret message vouchsafed to one of the original Fátima witnesses and revealed by the Vatican in 2000.

We get the fascinating story of Jean Cabri, a nineteenth century Bordeaux sailor whose ship ends up stranded on the Marquesas Islands in the Pacific. Cabri goes native and, following local custom, is tattooed all over. Eventually he returns to Europe via a Russian ship to become an object of curiosity in France. Just before he dies, a dealer in curios offers to purchase his tattoos off him, planning to have his body skinned after his death. Edmond is drawn to write about Cabri as an example of somebody who becomes 'wholly other'. Fernando Pessoa, the Portuguese poet, and another user of multiple identities, offers the remark that 'the central error of the literary imagination is the idea that other people are like us and must therefore feel like us. Fortunately for humanity, each man is only himself.' Our author runs with this theme - the uniqueness of the individual - and it under pins much of his book.

Throughout, we learn more of Edmond's own life: how he came to Sydney in 1981 from his native New Zealand and worked at odd jobs - taxi driver, night sorter in the post office - while making his way as a writer. He takes us through bizarre personal events such as the 'fake' wedding ceremony he attends where his girlfriend, needing the money, gets married to a gay Chinese man keen to acquir3e an Australian passport. At the registry office two couples in love are there, although one is marrying the partner of the other.

He writes of the horrific Batavia mutiny and shipwreck off the coast of Australia, and much more. The title refers to a journey to Luca Antara, an island that first appeared on a 1602 map and which was probably present-day Australia. The journey in question was undertaken by Antonio da Nova, the servant of the Portuguese explorer, Godinho de Heredia. Da Nova's account of his journey was published in 1621, and the only remaining copy was lodged in the archives of the royal library in Brussels until it disappeared. Edmond manages to outline a modern-day summary of it by a diligent search that leads him eventually to Mallaca. He then sets off on his own journey, following in the footsteps of da Nova, to try to authenticate this early 'discovery' of Australia.

The book is therefore part autobiography, part history, part travel book and part quest narrative, an unusual combination that nevertheless works. Indeed, Edmond's text is often a pure pleasure to read, full of felicities of style and construction. I enjoyed my time in Edmond's company, not least because of the way he notices minor details and gives them their proper due. Only towards the end does the book sag a little, as he makes his way, held up by unavoidable travel delays, along the same route as da Nova. There is too much detail of meals eaten and shops visited, making it closer to a travelogue then the earlier suspenseful writing.

Overall I would recommend this book highly for its originality, its imaginative recreation of the past and its prospective impulse. It is full of the 'surprises, and adventures, and incongruities and contradictions, and incredibilities' that Mark Twain noted as being characteristic of Australian history.

John Clay

The Literary Review

FULL REVIEW

Luca Antara is an idea of Australia as conceived in the 17th century and sought by Antonio da Nova, a Portuguese servant, who is sent to discover it. Edmond, a Sydney cab driver and bibliophile, discovers da Nova and sets out to discover the Australia he inhabits. On one level, Edmond's curiously ambiguous book might be mistaken for a novel; on another, it is autobiography; on yet another it is literary history (much concerned with the hoax poems of Ern Malley); or it might be, in another shift of the book's tectonic plates, a topography of Australian national culture.

Iain Finlayson

The Times

FULL REVIEW

In this part-memoir, part-fiction, part-history, Edmond attempts to find ‘Luca Antara’, the fabled land down under. He tells us about his life as an immigrant to Sydney in the early 1980s, where he spent his free time negotiating love triangles, attending ‘heroin weddings’ for illegal immigrants and haunting an antiquarian bookshop. Several historical figures loom large in his quest, among them Fernando Pessoa, the Portuguese poet, Antonio da Nova, the servant of a 17th-century explorer, and a Malaysian academic.

Edmond has all the ingredients for a fantastic literary concoction. While his passion takes him from the darkest library corners to Melaka in Malaysia, however, it does not necessarily transport the reader there.

History, travelogue and personal revelations – all elements that are at times diverting, even illuminating, in isolation – read too much like a pastiche rather than as part of a whole and compelling journey.

Naomi Mapstone

The Financial Times

FULL REVIEW

The porousness of generic borders isn’t exactly news, and anyone who’s read W. G. Sebald has a vivid sense of just how much can be accomplished in that hazy ground between memoir, history and speculation. Martin Edmond sallies into that same ground with 'Luca Antara' — part memoir, part fiction and part quasi-­scholarly inquiry into the history of the earliest discoverers of Australia. The author of two books of poetry and several works of nonfiction, Edmond is a New Zealander who sees Australia as both familiar and exotic. In an opening author’s note, he reminds us of Mark Twain’s remark in 'Following the Equator' that Australia’s history is 'so curious and strange' that it reads like 'the most beautiful lies.'

Edmond as protagonist is, in emotional and intellectual terms, an odd mix of the settled and the restless, which causes him to move associatively from one scholarly compulsion to the next. And his investigations generate a series of journeys, imagined and actual, that carry him from the 17th century to the 21st. We’re introduced to him after his arrival in Sydney in the early 1980s, a haunter of antiquarian bookshops who’s already obsessed with eastern Polynesia. As an amateur scholar, he under­stands how tenuous our notion of truth has to be — especially when it comes to our earliest histories — and seizes on that indeterminacy as both burden and liberation, at his most assured in the nexus of armchair anthropology and pleasurable fable.

He retells the accounts of various explorers — a ship’s cook marooned off an English whaler; a French adventurer who went native; Herman Melville’s uncle; Leo Tolstoy’s cousin — and to call those accounts wildly romantic would be an under­statement. Tolstoy’s cousin, a member of 'the crack Preobrazhensky Guards,' 'a superb shot and adept at fencing as well as with the sabre,' having tormented his shipboard companions throughout the South Pacific, found himself put ashore on a deserted island off the Alaskan coast for 'preaching revolution to the sailors.' Not to worry — from there he made friends with the Tlingit Indians, became skilled with the harpoon and the bow, and eventually crossed the whole of Siberia to return to Moscow. Oh: And he had an orangutan in tow for most of the way.

These tales take on some of the charm of an adventure story for children. 'And after they had eaten, Warri Warri raked the embers of the fire together and put on more wood and sat cross-legged in front of it and began to sing in his own language, while da Nova stretched out in the soft sand and slept; and outside lightning flashed and thunder rolled and rain pelted down as if it would never end.' What’s aspired to here is 'a ‘Boy’s Own’ version of events that was vivid, geographically and historically accurate, and somehow charming in its artlessness.'

In that passage, Edmond is actually talking about some Malay paintings, but the metafictional self-consciousness of the book’s design allows us to register what unites all these objects of fascination — it’s not just what his predecessors encountered but the unreliability of what they described, an unreliability that Edmond views the way one might a naïve artist’s work: 'In other words, when you have grasped his naïvety, his duplicity, his self-interest, you may learn to take him at his word.'

The book is shot through with accounts of literary hoaxes and proliferating selves, with fictional figures who seem real and vice versa, with the notion of the labyrinth of the self inevitably evoking Borges and Calvino: 'Anyone who engages with this oeuvre enters the maze without hope or perhaps desire of ever exiting; and, if they write as well, cannot avoid adding paths, with their inevitable false leads, non sequiturs and dead endings, to that maze.' But this is well within Edmond’s comfort zone, since he’s settled on a rule of thumb that García Márquez adopted from Kafka: 'It was not necessary to demonstrate facts: it was enough for the author to have written something for it to be true, with no proofs other than the power of his talent and the authority of his voice.'

Which leaves us in a pleasurably vexed position with regard to the book’s self-presentation as a treasure chest of South Pacific lore, from Marquesan sexual practices to Macassan nautical design. Had you known that certain Indonesian seafarers used caged roosters in the bows to look for obstacles in the water ahead? Or that the Kei Islanders made underwater rattles out of coconut shells to lure sharks for harpooning? Or that an expedition to capture a komodo dragon was the origin of 'King Kong'?

This is digression as technique — en route to an assignation, Edmond strays into an account of the history of the business occupying the building where he’s about to have sex — and as such it doesn’t entirely avoid banality (at one point he informs us that he had a salad for lunch and checked his e-mail at an Internet cafe) or the travel writer’s empty boosterism: 'I had not met any magician or seen the future but it did seem there was still some enchantment abroad in old Malacca.' At times, too, the exoticisms can cohere into a kind of palisade. 'Mataram,' he writes, 'is in western Lombok, in those days divided into squabbling states ruled by Sasak princes.'

A bigger problem is that there’s not too much pushing against those compulsions on which our hero acts: although he’s nicely self-aware about his desire for novelty and his need to be involved with some kind of puzzle to solve, the extent to which his obsessions create a withdrawal from life goes mostly unexamined. (He tells of hearing a neighbor attacked and doing nothing but calling the police, then abandons the implications.) He acknowledges that without quests he’d turn to substance abuse but describes that abuse elsewhere as more mind-expanding than destructive, and the misery glimpsed in a passing moment in which he notes his 'eyes small and piggy in the mirror, face collapsed in sad lines of loneliness and defeat' is never explored. We understand his desire, like that of his alter egos, to feel himself 'slipping away from everything he had known and been,' but the nature of the figurative land left behind remains obscure. The book’s central question — 'What had it taken to explore, let alone settle, this terrible emptiness?' — is approached with erratic rigor, leaving Edmond reminding us of one of his other doubles: 'one of those extroverts who do not brood overmuch on their fate but rather look upon life as a series of opportunities in which to shine forth as the unique individuals they are.'

But ultimately, any memoir’s agenda may be to present the multifariousness of the self, and where Edmond the protagonist is most vivid is in his evocations of his adopted Australia. Whether describing the 'buttery glow' of late sun on 'dun-colored sandstone' or the 'red termite mounds leaning like the ruined towers of miniature cities,' he’s constantly demonstrating that the natural world is as splendiferous as any fable. It’s in those moments — in which he imagines, say, his surrogates dumb with wonder at the thousands of pink-mauve jellyfish sailing by 'like clouds in the water' — that we feel the affecting complexity of his presence, asserted triumphantly. 'He leapt over the side and, thigh-deep in the warm clear sea, waded in and fell to his knees on the beach and raised his arms above his head. Here, he murmured to no one but the land. Here I am.'

Jim Shepard

New York Times

FULL REVIEW

Martin Edmond, finding himself driving taxis in Sydney and spending his spare time in second-hand bookshops, begins a quest for the history of Australia. His research leads him to Antonio da Nova, the man sent to discover Luca Antara (Australia). As Edmond embarks on his own journey to discover the truth behind da Nova's tale, their lives become intertwined and distinctions between fact and imagination are blurred. A quotation from Twain opens the story: "It does not read like history, but like the most beautiful lies." Edmond's version of events is described with such passion and insight that one forgets to care whether the story is fact or fiction.

Nicole Green

The Observer

FULL REVIEW

A journey through Australian history via second-hand bookshops. A spellbinding autobiography and narrative of ideas.

The Times

FULL REVIEW

Son of a New Zealand poet, Martin Edmond has lived in Australia since 1981, and manages to describe it in exquisite detail.

With lyrical understanding, Edmond brings to life both modern and historical Australia via a journey of discovery and ideas. With evocative descriptions, the author discusses quests and origins, the intersections of personal and social history, literature and the nature of truth, and the compulsion to search, dream and travel.

Edmond's wry contemplation of Australia, combined with a unique detective story, is eclectic, humorous, and cock-a-bloc with sharp observations and poignant moments. Original and fantastical, Edmond writes about the discovery of a continent, and its rediscovery through his own eyes. This is a must-read for anyone attempting to understand Australia and its diverse and beautiful culture. [four stars]

Francesca Roberts

Australia & New Zealand Magazine

FULL REVIEW

The picture created by Edmond is fascinating and fluidly written, and a worthy diversion from straightforward historical fiction.

The Historical Novels Review

FULL REVIEW

A detective story for bibliophiles, Luca Antara is as much a tale of books lost and found as it is what it purports to be: a history of the origins of Australia. The title comes from the name given to a semi-discovered land in the late 16th century by explorer Manoel Godinho de Erédia. It could be Australia or any number of Indian Ocean islands and can translate as 'the day after the day in between'. At the centre of Martin Edmond's palimpsest of past explorations is an account that is apparently by Antonio da Nova, Erédia's servant, who was sent back to find Luca Antara when illness forced Erédia to give up his quest. Emailed to Edmonds by an unstable ex-scholar based in Melaka who goes by the pseudonym of Henry Klang, it may well be nothing more than a beguiling fiction.

On learning of da Nova's voyage (itself the result of a voyage of a chance discovery in a bookshop that disappeared the next day, only to reappear near his apartment), Edmond writes: 'I wondered if it would be possible to fabricate an account of this voyage in such a way as to give it not just credence as a work of fiction but the unmistakable aura of truth, but decided, reluctantly, that both historical novel and non-fictional recreation were probably beyond my ability to write.' I'm not so sure. In this wonderfully original memoir, he appears to have done both.

Ian Beetlestone

The Observer