Book Review – A Ticket for Perpetual Locomotion by Geoffrey Gates

A Ticket for Perpetual Locomotion isn’t my kind of novel. I might as well mention that straight up, because this review will probably be unfairly lukewarm toward Geoffrey Gates’ IP Picks Award-winning novel. My kind of novel, I’ve decided, has a strong, even monolithic narrative. It is between 200 and 400 pages in length, and there is plenty of action (but not of the Bruce Willis kind). The actual subject of the novel isn’t as important to me as the way that the writer invites us into the mind of someone interesting and/or different. Andrew McGahan’s Praise is the perfect example of this, and Deane’s Another hovers in the same territory, even if it does use multiple narrators. I’m not against multiple narrators per se, but what really appeals to me is narrative drive. I also tend to favour dark and gloomy themes to light and breezy ones.

A Ticket for Perpetual Locomotion, then, isn’t my kind of book. It is light, zany even, and it is full of different viewpoint characters. The central premise of the novel is one that will be familiar to readers of Calvino or other metafictioneers. Perpetual Locomotion is a concept in which travellers renounce their routine lives in favour of eternal travel, for which they will never have to pay a cent. The catch is they can never re-trace their footsteps. We are introduced to a young man called Carlos who is about to begin his adventure in Perpetual Locomotion, which we soon discover is also the name of a novel by Eduardo Maranda.

A Ticket for Perpetual Locomotion takes place, for the most part, in Australia and Mexico. There is a substantial cast of characters, from the beautiful Manon to the wily Eduardo. Gates employs a technique in which sections (very short chapters for the most part) are told often out of chronological order. Presumably this is supposed to be weaving a rich tapestry, but I found it confusing. Worse, the characters began to blur together by around the mid-point of the novel, which left me bemused. It’s my own fault, of course, for not paying sufficient attention, but if I have a real criticism of this novel it is that the characters feel very same-y. There isn’t often much to differentiate them, except for Eduardo himself, who is well realised. Gates also employs a slippery shifting from past to present tense and back again. What this is supposed to achieve, I can’t quite say.

What I can say about Gates’ novel is that it is technically well written, and features an excellent cover. I suspect that others might enjoy this a fair bit more than I did. There wasn’t anything wrong with A Ticket for Perpetual Locomotion, but it simply wasn’t to my tastes. By my grand old age (27) I know my likes and dislikes, and to a large extent the pattern for future reading is set. I would be willing to give Gates a second go, however, because he is certainly a talented writer.

Book Review – Another by Joel Deane

Joel Deane’s Another won the Interactive Publications IP Picks ‘Best Fiction’ Award in 2004, and was published in the same year. This is my first Joel Deane book, and my first IP book as well, so I was interested to start reading straight away. In terms of the physical production of the book, I was pleased to discover that Another was professionally put together. The only problem I had was that a few of the lines had not been printed correctly, i.e. they were faded. This was only 3 or 4 lines in the book, so it’s a small issue. From what I had read about the book, I imagined that Another would cover a similar terrain to that in Andrew McGahan’s Praise and 1988. This assumption was partially correct, but if Another can’t match the stunning narrative drive of McGahan’s Vogel winner, it certainly rose above anything else that I’ve read of McGahan’s.

Another is a novel about a working class (if I am being unkind I would say white trash) family living in outer Brisbane, presumably in the  mid-nineties. Late teen Toby Purcell is our main ‘protagonist’ (the inverted commas are because his actions can hardly be described as positive in any way). He lives with his Mum, his Gran, and a woman called Michelle. We soon discover that Michelle is in fact the girlfriend of Toby’s older brother Danny, who seems to have disappeared somewhere. The novel opens with an image of fire which, on reflection, never really leaves us as the book progresses. There is the fire which consumes Toby’s flesh, the fire of the burning Brisbane sun, and the fire of rage in the hearts of virtually everyone in this novel. This isn’t a bedtime read type of novel. Being the way that I am (read: a little odd) it was water off a duck’s back for me, however.

Okay, what happens in this book? Well, in time-honoured fashion Deane weaves his narrative to reveal events occurring in the past at specific times. This was an area that I felt Another really shone, for the method was more sophisticated than the overused ‘one chapter present, one chapter past’ technique. I would have to re-read the book to discern precisely how Deane achieved this, but suffice to say that the narrative is constructed around family secrets.  Having said that, a couple of Another’s secrets were all too obvious, even for a dense reader like me. The nature of Danny’s current condition is a prime example of this.

I still haven’t talked about the plot. It’s basically a narrative about Toby and his self-harming girlfriend Suzie’s crime spree. As the narrative progresses, their crimes become more brazen, but they always manage to elude capture. Just as much as this, though, the book is about personal tragedies, particularly the tragedies of women who are the victims of domestic violence. This is a sour, sometimes shocking book. One scene, in which Toby breaks into a house to find a baby left alone for hours in a crib, is particularly moving. Toby bludgeons a service station attendant half to death for $45, and later remembers how good it felt to wreak violence on another person. This is harsh, unapologetic, and grim. I suspect that people who aren’t as addicted to tales of destruction and dissolution as I am might find it difficult to enjoy reading this. But enjoy it I did.

This is also about racial intolerance (this is Brisbane in the One Nation years) and the crippling effects of poverty. Deane isn’t one to ram a theme down you’re throat, however. The closest he comes to direct satire is a quip about an Aboriginal man walking into a bookstore being a bigger security threat than the rampaging Toby and Suzie. And yet a sensitive reading of Another can’t but notice Deane’s cool rejection of much of the material here. It is a subtle art to write so candidly about such horrific matters, without anything but the merest hint of authorial disapproval, and expect the reader to interpret the novel ‘correctly’. (If I am interpreting it correctly.) But here I found Another to be a success. This is literature without needing to be Literature. I respect Deane for being able to write as clearly and as candidly as he does.