A novel of love, crime, magic, fate and coming of age, set in Brisbane's violent working class suburban fringe - from one of Australia's most exciting new writers.
Brisbane, 1983: A lost father, a mute brother, a mum in jail, a heroin dealer for a stepfather and a notorious crime for a babysitter. It's not as if Eli's life isn't complicated enough already. He's just trying to follow his heart, learning what it takes to be a good man, but life just keeps throwing obstacles in the way - not least of which is Tytus Broz, legendary Brisbane drug dealer.
MY THOUGHTS:
Oh wow, it's a rare sort of story that makes me want to jump out of my seat and fist pump the air even once, and this one caused that reaction several times. Trent Dalton just keeps upping the intensity of those triumphant moments.
Perhaps the fact that I was a similar age to the hero Eli Bell; a young teen in the mid eighties Aussie suburbia, has something to do with it. Although my background is nothing like Eli's (thank heavens!), the nostalgia of time and place is still thick enough to rewind my mind instantly back to those rough old years between 1985 and 1991.
The back cover blurb tells all a reader really needs to know. Eli's stepfather Lyle is a heroine dealer, his mother Frances is an ex-junkie and his babysitter, Slim Halliday, is a noteworthy ex-jailbird with a Houdini reputation. Eli hasn't seen his biological father, Robert Bell, for many years, but there's a good reason for that, as Robert endangered the lives of his baby sons. Surrounded by all these examples of misplaced passion, Eli still aims to be a 'good man', although he knows he has only the guiding light of his own conscience and intuition to figure out what that even means.
This is essentially a bildungsroman, or growing up story, taking him from the age of 12 to 19. Pondering the twists and turns his life takes shows Eli that there are often strong veins of good to be mined in the soil of apparently bad lives.
Equally lovable but more mysterious than Eli himself is his selectively mute brother August, who can talk perfectly well but chooses not to. The face August shows the world is that of a young eccentric, but those who know him realise there are reservoirs of deep knowledge in his nature which he's unwilling to share for fear of being misunderstood. August decides from a young age that it's safest to shut up completely. He's a fascinating example of a hero who's learned to be content with his own rich inner life from an early age, and offers a sense of faith and stillness to every scene he's in.
By contrast, Eli is a probing boy, an aspiring young reporter who longs for answers, but discovers that sometimes the ones he seeks are not worth discovering. Or in other words, he's asking the wrong questions. We get to share some nuggets of wisdom Slim teaches the boys, won by hard experience. The best way to maximise our time on earth is to savour every detail of our daily minutiae. Something as subtle as the sense of smell is a container of deep meaning. Or from their dad, Robert Bell, sometimes you have to choose things that are good over the things that are easy.
This gave me a book hangover. I wanted more of gutsy, reactive Eli and peaceful, enigmatic August. There's some fast paced action, some entertaining romance, a truly corrupt villain, and just enough strange magical realism stuff to show it's an unfathomable world out there. (Any theories about the red telephone, anyone?) Overall, Eli has just the perfect combination of compassion and originality to make him do some crazy things from the goodness of his heart, and what more can we ask for in a hero? I'll be looking out for Trent Dalton's other novels for sure.
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