FIRST-TIME author Christopher Morgan will launch his novel The Island of Four Rivers in Yarraville’s Sun Bookshop next month.
Mr Morgan’s black comedy focuses on the Davis family and its patriarch Bill, who suffers a stroke.
He was inspired to write the novel after a brain tumour landed him in hospital.
“In the hospital, I was in a ward with three older men who each had suffered a stroke, and it was an enlightening experience,” he said.
“I realised that they weren’t as they appeared to be. Their minds were active but they were incapable of expressing themselves.”
Mr Morgan said one of the men could say only “yes, yes, yes” or “no, no, no” in response to questions.
“He had to try to communicate his every need with those words. People started to think his mind was gone – that he was just a vegetable.”
But Mr Morgan’s partner one day brought a sunflower to the hospital and his reaction showed that was not the case.
“He got really excited and started to jump about in his bed, and so I put the sunflower on to his table.
“I had to lean over his bed to do it, and as I did so he whispered that he had beautiful flowers in his garden and that was the first time he ever spoke.
“I looked down and he looked like he was still in a state he’d always been in. That’s what made me realise that these people were bandaged in this disability, but deep down inside they were still capable, thinking people.”
Mr Morgan recovered from the brain tumour but was left with double vision and a slowness of thought.
“I don’t believe depth of thought is lessened, but I believe the thought arrives in the head a bit slower,” he said of his recovery.
He said writing helped him to work at his own pace and was actually the profession he’d always wanted.
“I was a musician, furniture maker, gardener. I was always good at dreaming, but I could never make a living out of it,” he said.
“Writing for me confirms that I can make a living using my imagination.”
Mr Morgan began writing after taking a writing course in 2000.
He procrastinated one day about writing the novel as he walked down a street in South Yarra.
“A car came up on the footpath and ran me over, breaking my leg and fracturing my skull.”
He wrote The Island of Four Rivers in 2002 while recovering from the injuries.
In the novel, Bill is dependent on life support after his stroke and the Davis family must decide when to take him off the machine.
Tension in the family is heightened as the decision makers – embittered wife Dot, estranged daughter Eleanor and son Henry – dislike each other.
“To all intents and purposes he’s brain dead and these people, who don’t particularly get on, have to reach this fantastic decision,” Mr Morgan said.
“On one level, it’s about how they do this and what influences them.”
The story is interwoven with the diary-recorded adventures of a Victorian-era explorer, who discovers an island that has four rivers.
“He finds that one river is blocked and decides to go and see what is blocking it.”
Without stating the obvious, Mr Morgan draws an analogy between the four ventricles of the brain and the four rivers in the book.
The Yarraville resident said he would launch his second book, Pirates Eat Porridge, at the Sun Bookshop in September.
Contact the store on 9689 0661 for further information.
