- A self-entitled waste of space rants on about his miserable life. That's the bad 10% of this novel. The rest is magnificent. Every page buzzes with dazzling, scathing, scintillating prose. There are pinprick demolitions at every turn, and brilliant similes ('...a grin welded onto his face like a roo bar').
- Oli Darling is a 40 year old queer man who has built a very successful career as a painter totally due to the commercial genius of his agent and drug dealer Anton. On a TV talk show one night (the ABC's Q+A obviously) he lets loose on Australia's toxic masculinity and colonial myth building like Gallipoli. He’s articulate and right, but to many in the audience offensive. He’s condemned on social media.
- To help restore Oli's reputation Anton suggests he write a memoir which would be ghosted by a young and talented woman. This allows Oli to not only open up about his life as a young man struggling with his sexuality, but to express his colourful views on all sorts of things. And you have to say, his views are hugely entertaining on every level. This is Pieper at his best.
- He's so good on the contrast between the Sydney and Melbourne monied classes, the country/city divide, and the privilege of private schools. At a fancy dinner in Sydney he is approached by 'the Miner', after 'moving breadsticks and brie from the buffet to her mouth with the methodical, hypnotic menace of a bucket excavator...Her knack for finding precious metals in untouched wilderness...is legendary. It has made her wildly prosperous and caused the extinction of countless species'.
- The final thirty or so pages of the book builds the reader's anxiety to a high level. How will Oli's story end?
- Pieper has written a superb novel, and I found myself reading sections and chapters over and over again. I was captured by his rich prose - luxuriating in it.
(In The Guardian the humourless BeeJay strikes again!)
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