I had a couple of reasons for finally trying to track down Boy Swallows Universe. A friend of mine had been asking about Australian Lit last year, and and I had to shamefully admit to her that I hadn’t read this one yet. Then I heard an adaption was going to be released on Netflix. Then I listened to an interview with the author who mentioned the semi-biographical elements to it. (Richard Fidler strikes again.)
And that’s the bit that kind of tipped me over; Trent Dalton did not have the most… conventional upbringing and I wanted to see how that played out. I do have a bit of a passing interest in the Australia’s criminal underworld from decades back (I’ve reviewed books on the subject here and here) and despite the book being quite well known and well hyped back home since it’s release, I somehow missed that Boy Swallows Universe was a magically realistic take on a young boy coming of age while dealing with Brisbane’s criminal underbelly.
It’s the early eighties, and twelve-year-old Eli Bell’s home life is more than just dysfunctional—it’s chaotic. His mother, Frankie, and her boyfriend, Lyle, are both drug dealers trying to keep clean. Meanwhile, his beloved older brother, August, has been mute for several years.
That’s August’s fault. Boy don’t talk. Chatty as a thimble, chinwaggy as a cello. He can talk, but he doesn’t want to talk. Not a single word that I can recall.
Despite the fact that August never uses his voice, he still a consummate communicator; with a touch of the arm or a quick change in expression, August can convey anything. Their mum says the universe stole August’s words, but it may also have something to do about a dream with a car.
With their mum and her boyfriend involved in drug dealing and their dad out of the picture, Eli and Gus often find themselves in need of a babysitter. That role is filled by Slim Halliday. On one hand, Slim seems to act as a wise mentor to Eli, who often thinks of the old man’s words in moments of reflection. On the other hand, Slim belongs firmly within Brisbane’s criminal underworld, wanted for murdering a taxi driver and escaping from the infamous Boggo Road Gaol*.
Despite his frequently dysfunctional surroundings, Eli’s relationship with both his brother and with Slim have left him with a heightened sense of awareness. But he’s still only 12 years old and perhaps a little too curious and naïve for his own good. His goodnatured need to follow August’s lead for example, leads to him having a very strange phone call in his parents safe room that haunts him throughout the novel. A second incident that has Gus refusing to follow Eli’s lead in return ends with him following his stepdad Lyle out into the street after noticing him behaving suspiciously This introduces Eli directly to Brisbane’s heroin trade and to the name Tytus Broz, setting off a chain of events that turns his and his brother’s lives even further upside down.
Tytus Broz makes me think of bones because he’s made a fortune out of bones
Eli Bell makes a delightful point of view. While perhaps slightly more wise and self aware than most 12-year-old kids, Eli is still a 12-year-old kid. A 12-year-old kid with a slightly cynical and black sense of humor to boot. This makes many of his observations in the book darkly hilarious. Mind you some scenarios he finds himself in also oddly ludicrous, and I am saying this while being fully aware of the setting. For example, when watching his maybe friend-maybe bully, definite little shit-heel and wannabe drug lord Darren Deng stabbing someones car with a sword, this is Eli’s inner narrative:
“Through the holes in his balaclava, Darren closes his eyes. He raises the blade high with both fists gripping the handle, concentrating on something inside, like an old warrior about to ritually end the life of his best friend, or his favourite Australian suburban getabout motorcar.”
… which seriously, is just the cherry on top of an already insane scenario. Darren’s balaclava, for example, is a pair of his Mum stockings which he raided from the dirty clothes basket. She’s got “fat thighs for a Vietnamese woman”, so they’re more than suitable for the job. Apparently. And while little Darren is a bit of a wannabe gangster, his mum is a big player in the drug trade; more so than hapless Frankie and Lyle.
And the car stabbing? That’s is not the worst trouble these two get up to during the evening.
As you can probably tell from the given quotes, Trent Dalton has a phenomenal written voice. And the setting? He never wants you to forget it. Every name drop, every simile, every implied metaphor is soaked in early 1980’s Australiana
He can tell you how he’s feeling by the way he unscrews a Vegemite jar lid.
On top of that, our protagonists are very warm and endearing, most of all Eli himself. The antagonists are less so, and are slightly more cartoonishly sketched out, but for much of the book Eli is still a young boy, so it sort of makes sense.
The only issue the I had with Boy Swallows Universe arises rather late in the book, where there seems to be a shift in genre that may me feel feel as if someone didn’t have the clutch pushed in correctly when they grabbed for the gearstick.
I wrecked my brain a bit for a comparison and the closest I could come up to was the novel Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow by Peter Hoeg. Now, Nordic Noir may not be the best comparison for Brizzie-style magical realism, but it’s the only other novel that I could think of that had quite a blunt shift in genre and tone at it’s end. Now to reassure people who read Miss Smilla, Boy Swallows Universe does have a much more upbeat ending than that book, but the tone of the ending doesn’t quite match the tone that we start with? I did find it jarring, and I’m not quite sure what the author was going for. Whatever his intent, I have no doubt it was deliberate.
Even despite the ending, this is the kind of book that sticks with you. I do feel slightly regretful that it took me so long to chase it up. I probably won’t be making the same mistakes with Trent Dalton’s other works.
For cbr16bingo, this is Vintage. While there is some ambiguity over the exact year the book is set in, I strongly suspect it starts in either 1983 or 1984. Which makes the setting ~40 years old.