Kindle. Cinematic, mongrelised magic realism. Another junk novel. Funny. Very deus ex. We're in the western and later northern suburbs of Brisbane: Darra next door to Oxley, Moorooka, thereabouts. Things start in the early 1980s for two pre-adolescent brothers and proceed for about a decade, the ambient level of corruption remaining constant. There are Viets and Poles: both deal heroin but only the Viets have good food. The endless stories leave us yet wondering why Queenslanders vote the way they do.
Dalton tries valiantly in that Australian/Ned Kelly way to distinguish crims with hearts of gold from truly evil bastards, having it both ways with the heroin dealers and bikies but not the vivisectors who are literally beyond the pale. The obvious referents are:
- Heart of Darkness
- Moby Dick
- Catcher in the Rye
- Frankenstein
- Trainspotting
- Michael W. Clune: White Out (minus funny sex scenes), Gamelife (the Atari ET game is famously bad)
- Tim Winton
- Peter Corris
- Andrew McGahan, specifically Last Drinks — and will Dalton get a Ned Kelly too?
- Patrick White: The Solid Mandala
I'll stop here. It's done well enough that you won't care.
Apparently Joel Edgerton is going to make a TV movie of it.
Amelia Lester's flat review didn't sell it to me back in May, but Helen Davidson's brief notice did. John Collee found something profound here. Local reviews are legion as are pointers to even more source material.