Fredy Neptune: A Novel in Verse (1998) is a verse novel by the Australian poet Les Murray (1938–2019). The work is written in eight-line stanzas and follows the life of Fred Boettcher, a German-Australian sailor and farmer's son from New South Wales, during the years between the First and Second World Wars.
Plot Summary
The narrative begins with Fred Boettcher working on his family's farm near Dungog, New South Wales. At the outbreak of World War I, he is shanghaied aboard a German Navy battleship. While traveling through Turkey, he witnesses frenzied mobs burning Armenian women to death, an event that causes him, through moral shock, to lose his sense of physical touch. This mysterious disability—which he must hide—becomes both a protection and a curse as he travels the world.
Fred's picaresque journey takes him across multiple continents. He meets Banjo Paterson in Cairo, encounters T. E. Lawrence in Arabia, works as a hobo in the United States, labors in Hollywood, and later rescues a man from Nazi Germany. The novel spans roughly from 1914 to 1947.
Structure
The work is divided into five books:
- Book I: The Middle Sea
- Book II: Barking at the Thunder
- Book III: Prop Sabres
- Book IV: The Police Revolution
- Book V: Lazarus Unstuck
Reception
British poet Ruth Padel described the work as "a haunting, loving, fiercely democratic epic by a master poet." In Village Voice, critic Steve Burt called it "Murray's best work yet, an almost completely successful round-the-world adventure novel in enticing, flexibly slangy (and very Australian-sounding) eight-line stanzas."
Awards
Fredy Neptune won the 1998 Queensland Premier's Literary Awards Fiction Book Award.
Publication Details
- Author: Les Murray
- Publisher: Duffy & Snellgrove (Australia)
- Publication date: 1998
- Pages: 265
- ISBN: 1-875989-30-7
- Genre: Novel in verse
