Book of the week

Boy Swallows Universe Trent Dalton Fourth Estate $35

One of the characters in Australian novelist Trent Dalton’s Boy Swallows Universe ‘‘laughs at the ads on the telly with Paul Hogan putting another shrimp on the barbie’’.

Tourists, he says, should be rightfully advised of what happens five hours later ‘‘when the beers and the rums mix with the hard sun headache and widespread Saturday night violence spreads across the country behind closed

front doors’’. However, amid its realistic assessments, Dalton’s first novel is a tender, loving, coming-ofage story, part School of Hard Knocks and part the kind of laughout-loud humour that has its origin in empathy.

It is a book of bright, big detail that bombards the senses with a boy’s-eye-view of a skew-whiff world. Dalton, one-time assistant editor for the Brisbane Courier Mail, knows his city well and recreates it in evocative detail.

The smells and colours of Queensland public housing and a roll call of suburbs are the background for the story of Eli Bell, his brother, August, who decided

not to talk when he was 6, and their drug-dealing parents.

There is also the elderly Arthur ‘‘Slim’’ Halliday, the real-life infamous ‘‘Houdini of Boggo Rd’’, the only man to have escaped twice from the city’s most notorious prison.

Halliday babysits Eli and August, a laconic, patient presence, framed for murder by a corrupt Queensland police officer.

Dalton’s novel is a sprawling story with unforgettable characters. Darren Dang, Eli’s friend, is the tracksuit-wearing adolescent son of Bich Dang, Vietnamese dragon lady, supermarket and restaurant

owner, who is one of the city’s major heroin dealers. Tytus Broz is a civic figure and artificial limb maker, but his philanthropy conceals a sinister secret.

Boy Swallows Universe is a homage to resilience. The novel spans Eli’s adolescence and the incidents that contribute to his growth.

Puzzlement leads to discovery, enlightenment, and first love.

Despite its occasionally grim overtones, the primary emotions are curiosity, laughter, and joy.

Reality and fiction merge in the book. Dalton’s own parents were low-level dealers and there was, in actuality, a secret room in their house that was used as a panic room, if not a storage area for drugs.

This background veracity gives Dalton’s novel yet another dimension.

It is a vividly authentic book where the layers are continuously peeled away to reveal new perspectives.

Boy Swallows Universe is also a yarn in the best traditions of oral storytelling, with false leads, shaggy-dog meanders, and revealing commentary.

It preserves its sense of enthusiastic wonderment at the world from start to finish.

– David Herkt

Boy Swallows

Universe is a homage to resilience. The novel spans Eli’s adolescence and the incidents which contribute to his growth.