Seeing those three grown men, virtually middle-aged now, rattling around like grimacing skeletons in that decrepit old house, devoting so much of their time to the exclusion of all other goals in life, to the exclusion of all other interests, occupations, even pleasures, in the pursuit of that one mission, we have to pause here to ask: What is it about writing a novel that makes it such a driving force in some people’s lives, and at the same time, so impossible a task, often for those very same people?

Is there any other task, or “calling” as John has solemnly referred to it for twenty-four long years, that could possibly consume anyone so completely for so long, and with so little reward? Even the painters of the Sydney Bridge go home each night, drink beer with mates, raise families, go on holidays. Not our three men, John, Matthew, and Luke. Theirs was the ascetic life more than even for celibate priests, who at least get paid. Some people who want to be writers spend a terrible and lonely few hours every now and then with blank paper or screen in a special “writing room” in a nook upstairs by a tiny window overlooking the garden. Some might devote a whole weekend to it alone at a rented cabin on one of the islands, bills and empty bottles being the main output. Perhaps the more devoted give it a high-risk, full-time whirl for a few months and go to community school workshops under the cover of night. If they achieve some success—a story in a journal, a few less-than-completely discouraging rejection notes—they may or may not carry on, but it becomes a hobby, they join a writing group, they settle on one evening a week for the craft, that sort of thing. Maybe some do become writers, maybe they do get a novel published and experience that out-of-body thrill of seeing it for sale in some bookstore window they pretend to themselves they only happen to be passing, and off they go, they’re writers, they can make that claim at wine-and-cheese openings with all the stiff-grinning modesty of a Peter O’Toole.

But to work so long at “the developmental stage,” Matthew kept sarcastically calling it, to go on trying to be a writer without ever becoming one, not just for a few months, not just for a season or two, but for a whole twenty-four years, and to have made the attempt so total, not just as a weekend pursuit, not just as a hobby, but as a single-minded, all-consuming mission to which all other activities that make up the totality of life are subsumed as mere means to that end: that is rare. What are the chances, then, of finding three people of that dodo-bird-like description all living in one house? Slim, I’d say, and that’s understating it.

It’s not as though the three men didn’t know it was rare, likely stupid, possibly insane, to spend so much time without success or reward at this or any task. They awoke each morning struggling to rise under the corpse-like weight of that desperate fact first thing. Luke had a break-down once in bed upon awakening, shrieking in terror, unable to move, as though he found himself strapped to the front of a locomotive going off an embankment. The other two came in, tenderly comforting him, John even holding a cool cloth to Luke’s forehead while Matthew said “Shh, shh” to him, because they knew the feeling, they had all had several mornings like that. “It’s normal to feel that,” John even cooed to him, the way he’d seen Oprah once comfort a guest.

They had also over the years nearly killed each other, hurling tables, chairs, and lamps at each other’s heads, kicking and punching the walls, the appliances, even the stairs out front (a night when one, John, had succeeded in physically removing the other two, Matthew and Luke, from the premises, and locked the door on them, until they started destroying the house, Matthew tearing off the railing and using it to smash the front window, making John let them both back in, that whole affair ending in tears for them all as well).

Can you imagine how the air in that house would feel, under that kind of tension and frustration, after twenty-four years of this kind of thing going on every day? No wonder animals walked quickly past, heads down, and children stared, mouths gaping and silent. But of course no one could remotely guess what was really going on inside that crazy-looking house, no one could possibly imagine the true depths of despair bottled up inside those four bursting walls .

And now this, the denouement: one year, they realized, is all that is left on the deal. And the deal still stands, more certainly than even at the beginning, after so much has been invested. That deal, sealed with their hands clasped together in the dark forest at the centre of the campus twenty-four years earlier, went like this: The one with the best novel after twenty-five years would become a full-time writer no longer needing to work at anything else, to be given everything: money, food, rent. The other two would give up all pretensions to being a writer, and would instead devote themselves full-time to every need of the winner. Arguably, for the kind of men these three were, given what they had been through the last two-and-a-half decades, no greater reward could be imagined, and at the same time, no more punishing a penalty. If they have been devoted to the task of writing novels the last twenty-four years, this year, the final one in the contest, they would have to become madly frantic about it.

And then, in the unlikely event that one, if not all of them, actually completed a novel, how could we honestly say, given what Malcolm Lowry, for example, gave up to complete really only one great novel, that the whole thing wasn’t worthwhile, that those maddening twenty-four years were not somehow integral to the work to be completed in the twenty-fifth? Who among all wanna-be novelists, from the mother of three gazing with drooping eyes at her garden out the tiny window in that nook upstairs, to the barely-bearded young man pacing back and forth past the big bookstore window trying to evoke what the feeling would be to see his name on that pyramid of books piled inside (that was Luke), wouldn’t consider exchanging twenty-five years of desperation for the one great timeless novel? If you’re serious about it, if you believe you might have it in you to write one of those all-time greats, what really is twenty-five years locked up in a crazy, crooked house with two insane roommates compared to that possibility of immortality?

Now maybe you see how this whole thing got started twenty-four years ago. Wait till you hear what their novels are about.

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