Book Review - Boy Swallows Universe by Trent Dalton
It's 1983 in Brisbane, Queensland, Australia and 12 year old Eli Bell is growing up alongside his mute savant brother August, and a drug taking mother who is in a relationship with low level heroin dealer, Lyle. Ramsay street or Summer bay this ain't.
“Australian shrimp barbecue, when the beers and the rums mix with the hard sun headaches and widespread Saturday night violence spreads across the country behind closed front doors. Truth is, Bich said, Australian childhoods are so idyllic and joyous, so filled with beach visits and backyard games of cricket, that Australian adulthoods can’t possibly meet our childhood expectations. Our perfect early lives in this vast island paradise doom us to melancholy because we know, in the hard honest bones beneath our dubious bronze skin, that we will never again be happier than we were once before. She said we live in the greatest country on earth but we’re actually all miserable deep down inside and the junk cures the misery and the junk industry will never die because Australian misery will never die.”
Things take a turn for the worse when Lyle falls foul of a local drug kingpin, Tytus Bros. What follows is a rip roaring tale involving prison escapes, a criminal empire, and unrequited love with an older cime reporter. To say too much would spoil the sheer exuberance of the story.
Eli and Gus
Eli and his brother Gus are loveable characters. Eli wants to do the best for his family, dreaming of saving for a house in a 'better' part of the city. Gus is a mysterious presence, writing cryptic messages in the air such as ‘Your end is a dead blue wren.’
‘Boy doesn’t talk. Chatty as a thimble, chinwaggy as a cello. He can talk, but he doesn’t want to talk….he communicates fine enough, conveys great passages of conversation in a gentle touch of your arm….he can tell you how he’s feeling by the way he unscrews a Vegemite jar lid.’
Lyle is also a good stepfather to the boys, and there’s a lot of love in the family, whatever the difficulties. As a reader, you're rooting for them from the start.
Arthur ‘Slim’ Halliday
It's full of colourful characters, none more so than the boys babysitter, Arthur ‘Slim’ Halliday, a legendary prison escapee known as 'The Houdini of Bogoo road'. He dispenses some much needed life wisdom to the boys.
‘I’m a good man,’ Slim says. ‘But I’m a bad man too. And that’s like all men, kid. We all got a bit o’ good and a bit o’ bad in us. The tricky part is learnin’ how to be good all the time and bad none of the time. Some of us get that right. Most of us don’t.’
It was only after I finished the book that I learnt that he was a real historical figure, and friend of the Dalton family. Interesting to read that this was a semi autobiographical tale from Trent Dalton, which makes it all the more interesting. It's certainly not a misery memoir - it's about the power of family, and about overcoming the odds, whatever the hand you're dealt. It doesn’t make excuses either.
Trauma
There's also a 'magical' side to the book that works really well. It's about how children process trauama; Gus doesnt speak because of something that happened in his childhood - like I mentioned previously, he also writes cryptic messages in the air with his finger, which only Eli can read, backwards if need be. A word too for Daltons writing style, vivid and full of flavour, the dialogue snapping and crackling with wit - pleasure to read.
It reminded me a bit of 'Demon Copperhead' which another vivid coming of age tale about a boy from the wong side of tracks, dealing with a opiod epidemic. I also thought of ‘Cloudstreet’ by Tim Winton, another Australian writer, mainly because of the vibrancy of the prose and story, as well as the colourful cast.
Summary
It's a wild crime craper that become a bit OTT by the end, and there are l momments of violence throughout, even if to me they seemed a bit cartoonish. The 500 page length didn’t bother me as I was just enjoying the storytelling and characters. There is a Netflix show of the same name so I’ll certainly be checking that out soon.
This is cracking yarn, funny and full of heart, and I enjoyed it a lot.
464 pages,
June 18, 2018 by Harper Collins