Michael Farrell: a note on The Victoria Principle
Michael Farrell reflects on The Victoria Principle (1 May 2025), a debut work of fiction that follows six poetry collections the acclaimed Melbourne-based writer has published with Giramondo.
The first three stories of The Victoria Principle were an attempt to write aspects of my life (clinical depression and breakdown; my childhood experience of farmlife; Catholicism in its intense relationality with Jesus) at a level of fictional remove. In other words, they are experiments in autofiction.
‘“The Invisible Paddocks”’ uses the tropes of storytelling, and imagination, to parody the extremity of Australian settler farm life in the tradition of Steele Rudd: but using an amount of magical realism to depart from his mode. I try to counter the notion of a white bubble through the structure of the character’s adopted sister.
‘“Thinking About Ornithophobia”’ inaugurates a structure which recurs in The Victoria Principle, of a creative person who has a particular project in hand, in this case, an ecopoetics feature in a journal (something which I have experience of). It highlights the relation of this protagonist to birds during the human-deficient months of lockdown in Melbourne.
Some [stories] are purely fictional, some are partly autobiographical, or give clues – and red herrings – about my life, or rather gestures towards the narration and representation of it: as quotidian, magical, emotional, comedic.
The following seventeen were written later, and more quickly. They explore aspects of my own thinking about poetics as subject matter, lending a metacritical, as well as metafictional element; they try different metafictional devices; they try to work in different ways in terms of the structuring effects of voice. One aspect is trying to sustain a level of irony towards the stories throughout; another is taking a fragment of narrative, from conversation, or from a movie, and taking it somewhere else. Overall, the stories try out things that haven’t been possible in poems in over twenty years of publishing books of poetry: some are purely fictional, some are partly autobiographical, or give clues – and red herrings – about my life, or rather gestures towards the narration and representation of it: as quotidian, magical, emotional, comedic.
