The Mushroom Tapes is a book made up of transcripts of conversations between three writers about the trial of Erin Patterson in the Australian state of Victoria for the murder by poisoning of several of her husband’s relatives - on 29 July, 2023, she had them round for lunch and gave them a dish called beef Wellington, having, almost certainly intentionally, used death-cap mushrooms in the dish’s preparation.
The transcripts are linked by interconnecting segments written by an unidentified narrator who describes things like the courtroom and its protagonists, the view through the car window en route to the small town where the trial takes place and other extraneous details. Perhaps all of the three collaborators wrote these bits, perhaps just one of them, perhaps someone in the publishing house - either way, I felt that this element of the book’s structure did not quite work.
The three writers involved in the project are Helen Garner, Chloe Hooper and Sarah Krasnostein. The last on that list I had not heard of before. I have read a couple of books by Chloe Hooper, but largely forgotten them, and I have read many of Helen Garner’s books, including Joe Cinque’s Consolation, her account of the trial of Anu Singh for the killing in Canberra of her boyfriend Joe Cinque, and This House of Grief, her account of another Victorian murder trial, this time of a man called Robert Farquharson, who, after being discarded by his upwardly mobile wife, seems to have deliberately driven his car into deep water with his children inside it, making an escape, but leaving them to drown.
Those books by Helen Garner are very disturbing, but each achieves something that takes it out of the realm of voyeurism: Joe Cinque’s Consolation delivers a kind of justice for Anu Singh’s victim, Joe Cinque, and his family, particularly his mother, providing them with the dignity of being seen and recognised as victims and portraying Singh, who was convicted only of manslaughter, (mental health, innit), with a clarity that exposes the strong possibility that Joe Cinque did not get true justice from the legal system; in the case of Farquharson, Garner’s account goes a long way toward unlocking the mystery of how a man would reach a point where he thought drowning his children was a solution to anything - it provides understanding for the reader, transforming the alleged perpetrator from a demon into the lost, confused human that he almost certainly is.
This collaborative effort, by contrast, provides very little insight into anything except the curiosity of the three writers, and it therefore struck me as less successful, and possibly not really defensible. The book is dealing with reality, but it is unmethodical, impressionistic and for the most part little better than gossip. I felt grubby by the time I finished reading it.
Perhaps it was the book’s collaborative nature that was the problem - reading transcripts of the obsessive chats of three people about a senseless murder, I kept thinking of Gogglebox, with Sarah and Chloe and Helen as a posse of Goggleboxers on a sofa, lapping up the latest show, while readers look on. At one point Chloe Hooper herself says, “This trial is being used for public entertainment. I feel squeamish about joining the pile-on”, but of course in the end she overcomes her scruples. And, to be fair, I suspect that, if you were in Australia during the trial, unless you made a very deliberate decision to turn away and not be drawn into seeing the trial as a spectacle, it would have been all but impossible not to be swept along on a wave of ghoulish voyeurism.
Not that the authors set out deliberately to be ghoulish: indeed, they claim, in the curious third person plural narratorial voice that comes and goes during the book, that they only half want to write about the subject at all: “None of us wants to write about this. And none of us wants not to write about it.” Whatever the truth of that, in the end they cannot resist. And, having given in to the urge to write about the murder, they then publish what they have written - which means they finish up cashing in.
Of course, what I imagine they hoped to do - what anyone who looks at the case for half a moment would like to do - was to understand Erin Patterson and what might have motivated her to kill several members of her husband’s family. In this pursuit, each of the three writers is from time to time perceptive, particularly in highlighting the very contemporary way in which Patterson led her life: she had few in-person interactions, her real-life community appears to have been replaced by online ‘friendships’ with people most of whom she had never met face-to-face. As Krasnostein observes: “Her life was online. It was a fantasy life”.
One aspect of the case that the trio do not examine closely, (possibly they are not equipped to), is the role Christianity plays within it. The victims of Patterson’s murder were all devout Christians - unusually devout within the context of Australia, which is increasingly un-Christian. Patterson toyed with her victims’ religion, at one point she even claimed to have had some kind of epiphany, but in the end she drifted away from the church. Those she killed were kind to her. They prayed for her and urged her to pray when she was in difficulty. This is all mentioned in The Mushroom Tapes, but barely discussed.
It is true that on one occasion Garner does raise the question of evil - “I don’t really believe in the devil, but I do believe that people become possessed by evil”, she says, wondering whether this is what happened to Patterson: “There’s this great wretched darkness that she seems to reveal”, she muses, adding, “I have a horrible sense of her as a kind of black hole, a vortex” - but the book, being a twenty-first century book, published in Australia, does not pursue the question of evil much further than that. Indeed, Hooper at one point swaps out the word “evil” in Hannah Arendt’s banality observation and replaces it with “sociopathy”.
This is frustrating as I suspect that Erin Patterson’s crimes did arise from evil. Consequently, the nature of evil is the thing that needs looking at in the aftermath of her crimes. But instead the writers deflect, musing about whether fungi are the secret rulers of the world, talking about their dreams, wondering about the advantages and disadvantages of reporting the case as women, complaining about being old and feeling invisible, asking each other questions about the experience of reporting itself - what it was like to be in the media scrum after the verdict, for example - and ending up with a muddled sense of sympathy for the murderer, because the courtroom has, they feel, at times had the aspect of a “witch-trial”. Garner finishes by objecting to some of the photographs released of Patterson, because they are unflattering, while Chloe Hooper describes the decision by members of the families of the victims not to turn up for the verdict as “a power move”, which I think suggests a deep misunderstanding of their actions - and emotions.
The book is very readable, but it does not provide the reader with any greater understanding of why on earth this horrible event took place. Therefore it ends up being an entertainment and nothing more. Creating from an infinitely sad event something that is simply an entertainment does seem to me to be morally questionable. I realise what I am saying is that if this book were morally instructive I would find it less disturbing - and that may be for many a preposterous, old-fashioned proposition. But as the book, in the final analysis, is trivial and lacks any moral purpose, I do question its existence, and feel the time I spent reading it may have been wasted.
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On a lighter note, (if dark humour can be light), reading an article about a young chef this morning, I came across this advice about beef Wellington, and thought, “If only Erin Patterson’s guests had read this before they sat down at her table”:
