FICTION PICK OF THE WEEK Let the Boys Play Nicholas John Turner, Savage Motifs, $34.99 Set in a dystopian Brisbane overrun by corporate interests, Nicholas John Turner’s Let the Boys Play is a propulsive satire that gets under the skin of a motley cast – cops, giants, elite private schoolkids, even babies born in a world where everything, including future obscurity, is insurable. Turner’s hypnotic style puts the flow and cadence of maximalist syntax in service to playfully minimalist observation.
(The opening gambit devotes much hairspace, for instance, to a hirsute policeman surreptitiously scratching an itchy chest.) Turner is as weird and clever a literary outlier as Miles Franklin winner David Foster, though the shadow of the late David Foster Wallace is also evident. Plot plays second fiddle to characters “in search of an answer to which no one seems to know the question”, echoing the quest for the meaning of life in Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy .
Literary echoes abound, as do darkness and violence, but they’re worked into a droll and strangely compelling original. Anyone’s Ghost August Thompson, Picador, $34.99 A queer love story with the breath of doom upon it, August Thompson’s Anyone’s Ghost begins with the revelation that the love interest, Jake, has after three car crashes finally met his demise, at the tender age of 31.
For Theron, it’s the culmination of a haunting and formative friendship that began when he was 15 after.