Calamity to ignominy
The gap between what seems and what is usually makes for promising literary material. In the case of Melbourne journalist Callum Smith (aka Wordsmith or Words to his cronies — he has no friends), that gap is a gulf.
The monstrous yet moving protagonist of Sherborne’s new novel works the crime circuit in search of rancid narratives. He’s the sort who breaks and enters lives; pays a junkie to disrupt an evangelist service so he can get photos of worshippers ejecting him.
Words likes to think he’s idolised at home and work; that he’s “the one . . . who makes his copy sing”. In fact, his marriage has imploded and his career has faceplanted. The vodka is eroding his brain, sex is an historical event, and he has to leave his shirt-tail out to hide his waist flab. But thanks to a new job with an online tabloid, he maintains his delusions, convinced he can win back his wife, win over his son, win against his almost equally chaotic employer.
Sherborne dissects him like a pedantic frog: his pernickety grammar, dead glitter, soiled cynicism — “if there ever was a God, he must have slunk off disappointed” — his trajectory of dark disintegration and darker comedy.
We watch Words plot to compromise his wife’s boyfriend with the IRD; blackmail his son’s teachers into falsifying grades; attempt a sleazy repetition of the evangelist entrapment. Later, those evangelists exact biblical revenge.
Events hurtle from calamity to ignominy. Sherborne sometimes seems uncertain whether he’s writing a socio-psychological study, a fanged farce or a moral homily, but he has a good chomp at all three. A mixed grill but a savoury one — and its protagonist would instantly slash such a clunky metaphor.