THE NOVEL OF GOOD INTENTIONS Faith Singer, by Rosie Scott. Sydney: Hodder, 2001. 327 pp. Reviewed by Margaret Henderson Given the potential subject matter of rock music and its importance to culture more generally, surprisingly few Australian novels about rock'n'roll have been written. There are satires by Linda Jaivin, Justine Ettler, and David Foster but (rather like musicians themselves) few writers use rock music as a vehicle for serious social critique. Rosie Scott's latest novel, Faith Singer, however, steps into this territory, as a continuation of Scott's role as novelist of social problems. So Faith Singer seemingly promises some welcome relief from the apolitical, personalist, and family-focussed narratives typifying recent Australian fictions of the contemporary. Scott is very much a writer of heroines: strong, feisty, sisterly, yet staunchly hetero-sensual types with a political analysis and a social conscience, who do battle with a dehumanising society. For instance, in Feral City we had the two activist sisters, Faith and Violet, battling the wasteland of post-Rogernomics New Zealand. In Faith Singer there's the ex-rock star, Faith, our narrator, who works in a café in King's Cross and takes in homeless, drug-addicted youth. As her name suggests, Faith indeed 'sings' a particular kind of political faith, expressed through her mothering role that is also part of the healing process after losing her daughter to a drug overdose. She befriends a teenage prostitute, Angel, and tries to save her from a similar fate. Tempting dreams of Faith's past musical glories and a possible comeback provide interludes to this mother-daughter (melo)drama. Unfortunately, one of the book's major weaknesses is how Faith is written. While she is meant to be colourful, warm, complex, astute, a bit of wild girl, Faith ends up as a character riddled with clichés. There is a heavy reliance on her overly descriptive monologues, and some of these are absolute cringe material, for example, at her comeback concert: 'It was as if the music had stirred up the dumb grieving that lies at the heart of all of us; our inarticulate longing for understanding and forgiveness. That hopeful ragged singing out of the darkness seemed to be coming from the very depths of the people there, direct from some universal place of yearning tenderness' (318-19). (Compare this with the climax to Feral City - the similarities are uncanny.) This typifies our Faith: sentimental, a bit overwritten, straining for the poetic image, and with lashings of stodgy humanistic pop psycho-philosophy. Our wild woman actually is fairly predictable, and in her self-help platitudes masquerading as worldly wisdom, she becomes pretty annoying. Another weakness is the lack of a convincing sense of Faith's career in rock music. Given our Australian indie rock heroines of Faith's generation such as Chrissie Amphlett or Annaliese Morrow, or further afield, Chrissie Hynde or Debra Harry, or even in less alternative genres such as Stevie Nicks, it's hard to make any connection with Faith's rendering of rock'n'roll life and how it affects the girls. It's quite an achievement to make someone who is supposedly an ex-star sound so dull and nice. I sure wouldn't have bought her records or have written her name on my pencil case. On a more pedantic note (though it is symptomatic of the lack of authenticity that troubles the rock narrative), some of Scott's references to rock music are suspect. Faith reminisces about Bruce Springsteen's album The Ghost of Tom Joad as if it was in the dim distant past, but it was only released in 1995. I think she got it mixed up with the far more canonical Nebraska. The mother-daughter/savior-junkie plot allows Scott to evoke place graphically: there's plenty about King's Cross's underbelly but also its vitality, and this is one of the book's stronger aspects. This setting also gives Scott a range of semi-exotic character types to work with: trannies, junkies, pimps, pushers, the kind-hearted café proprietor, the waitress-observer of the Cross's rich pageant, and the respectable establishment types who feed on this sub-economy. As was the case with Faith, however, the description of characters is marred by cliché. For instance, the recurrence of descriptions of street kids being 'as beautiful as angels', 'angelic', 'angel-like', and a penchant for the word 'primal'. And of course her adopted daughter Angel is beautiful, imaginative, dreamy, and needs a mother. But will she succeed in giving up smack, or will she go the way of Faith's daughter? The problem is the predicable handling of the material and the intrusive narration by Faith. In this book, the moral universe is clear cut. Scott uses the Cross to expose not only the tragedy of teenage homelessness, prostitution, and drug addiction but to locate it as part of a wider social decay and malaise, which could be termed the heartlessness at the core of capitalism. The solution offered by Scott is Faith's 'good works': that is, an ability to construct nurturing spaces and relationships, and a valorisation of an inherent human creativity. Faith as mother figure, an alternative to the nuclear family, and her own idiosyncratic career path/life is a stark counterpoint to the victims of the system that surround her. Hence the book's emphases on female friendship, art, and the domestic. This importance of alternative modes of family, nurturing, and so on, was central to Scott's vision for an emancipatory political future in Feral City and has much to commend it. And Scott is one of the few contemporary novelists who can be bothered getting angry and trying to write political novels. Although in both Feral City and Faith Singer, it is a politics with a too sweet, too soft heart: bordering on the sentimental and the feminine rather than the feminist. I suspect that this softness arises from Scott's mode of representing politics as a strange mix of nineteenth century naturalist prose, soft left ideology, and social workerly concern. The result is a politics that seems outdated and overly optimistic for the realities it confronts. Scott's anger at the injustices of the system is genuine; I'm just not sure that heroines like Faith and highly descriptive mimetic writing are the answer. And I still find it weird and disappointing that a book covering this kind of subject matter in such a setting can end up dull and predictable, for all Faith's passionate pronouncements about life, politics, and art. The language of punk was invented for just such a historical conjuncture. Margaret Henderson is a lecturer in Contemporary Studies at the Ipswich Campus of The University of Queensland. Since completing her Ph.D on feminist literary and cultural theory she has published widely in that area and is currently working on a project on the history of Australian Feminism.