Due
to author Jon Doust, contemporary Australian literature is now blessed with an
outstanding new boys-to-men novel that belongs in the tradition begun with
Thomas Hughes’ Tom Brown’s Schooldays
in 1889.
I
spent years before adulthood absorbed in the story of Tom Brown and other books
like Louisa Alcott’s Little Men, HH
Richardson’s The Getting of Wisdom, Salinger’s
The Catcher in the Rye, and Golding’s
Lord of the Flies. I loved those stories and on reflection I
think they gave me language and concepts with which to deal with the exigencies
of growing up as a boy, often in all-male settings. And later, as a parent and
a school-teacher, I still found in them a rich trove of archetypal characters,
themes and situations that helped me to adopt a fruitful perspective on family
and professional life.
Jack
Muir, the narrator-protagonist in Jon Doust’s novel, also draws great succour
from Tom Brown’s Schooldays. He reads
the book early in his own horrid years as a boarder at Grammar School in Perth.
He tells us how it sustains him in that environment.
If
it wasn’t for Tom Brown I might not have made it through. Next to Jesus, Tom Brown’s Schooldays has to be the
greatest story ever told. Dad gave it to me one night when I was at home in the
holidays … I didn’t sleep that night until Tom Brown had finished his schooling
and gone on to Oxford and learnt in the summer of 1842 that his great mentor
and headmaster Dr Arnold had died. I cried. And I longed for one more crack at
Flashman, the evil, bullying bastard who tormented all small boys and those who
protected them.
Coincidentally,
some months before reading Boy on a Wire
I returned to the Tom Brown story for the first time in more than fifty years.
I was amazed at how much that book still moved me. One scene that still has the
most profound effect on me comes near the end of the book. Tom is talking with
young Arthur who is recovering from his near-fatal fever and their conversation
turns very deep. Don’t ask me to explain now the power this scene has for me: I
might attempt to do that one day after much more reflection.
But
for present purposes I’ll mention a statement made in that scene by Tom Brown. He
is nearing the end of Fifth Form and the two boys are reflecting on their life
at Rugby. Tom lists what he wants to achieve and take away from the school at
the end of Sixth Form, and then adds what he wants to leave behind.
“I
want to leave behind me,” said Tom, speaking slow, and looking much moved, “the
name of a fellow who never bullied a little boy, or turned his back on a big
one.”
It’s
the sort of statement that might have come from the mouth of Doust’s young Jack—except that his language
would probably be more earthy, in a mid-twentieth century Australian way, and sizzling
with anger.
Jack
encounters Tom’s Flashman in many guises at his own school, along with
sanctimonious hypocrisy and cruelty in the teachers. Repeatedly in his
narration he refers to Hughes’ nineteenth century novel as he lives out his own
variations on its themes, often saved only by his quick tongue and gift for
clowning.
Jack’s
difficult family relationships form another important strand in this deeply
moving—and often hilarious—story. Following a diagnosis by their doctor in
Jack’s infancy, his parents put many of his problems down to Pink Disease, a serious
condition said to be caused by mercury in babies’ teething powders. They teach
him to eat salt as a remedy.
One
can hear in Jack Muir an echo of Holden Caulfield, Salinger’s adolescent boy in
Catcher in the Rye. Holden’s story
occurred some years before Jack’s, and in the USA rather than Australia, but
there are fascinating parallels worthy of exploration. There is in Jack,
however, none of the whining attitude that is an irritating trait of Holden.
Boy on a Wire is a superb
novel, soaked in humour and pathos, and raising urgent questions about
Australian society and humanity at large. The prose is magnificent, simply
because you don’t think of it as prose: it is a voice, ringing truly into your ear with the vernacular and candour
of an Aussie adolescent.
Jon
Doust has given us a novel worthy of a position in the canon of boys-growing-up
literature, right up there with Hughes, Salinger, and Golding. The story is
very much about boys behaving badly, with all the coarse language and anatomical
details that involves. If you’re a parent you may have qualms about your lad
reading it. But I believe you should give it to him. And read it yourself.
Boy on a Wire is available as a paperback
published by Fremantle Press. I read it as an e-book on my Kindle, downloaded
from
