Talking Big

By Jay Innis Murray

“Firm ground is not available ground.”

– – – AR Ammons, “Dunes”

Here is a book that does not flinch. Here is a book about suffering. This is my novel of the year for 2024. Let the Boys Play sings a long song of contempt and disgust. It chants of living nightmares. It lays bare the worst feelings and the harshest obsessions in the hearts of a loosely connected set of people in a slanted contemporary (or near future) Brisbane. It sings in a brilliant rhetoric that has done more for the simile than any novel I can recall of the last twenty years. What does a simile do, or what does a writer do when they turn to a simile? The writer asks the reader: Don’t you see life just like this? Despite the tension I’ve introduced, don’t you? And the reader can no longer see it any other way.

Think of the amazing similes in Proust. One of my favorites comes about three quarters of the way into the Combray section. The narrator says (Lydia Davis translation):

 Sometimes in the afternoon sky the moon would pass white as a cloud, furtive, lusterless, like an actress who does not have to perform yet and who, from the audience, in street clothes, watches the other actors for a moment, making herself inconspicuous, not wanting anyone to pay attention to her.  

Isn’t that chummy? It’s transporting. When figures of speech are good enough, like Proust’s simile here, they are unforgettable. The simile does not have to be extended like this one to deepen the themes of a novel, but an author with talent, originality, and vision can use them like Michelangelo fussing with clamps, fittings and braces building his scaffolding to the Sistine ceiling. Throughout Let the Boys Play, Nicholas John Turner uses figurative language to tighten his grip on us and deny us any reason to look away from his portraits.

First of all, everywhere in this book, the human body is a source of anguish. For some, it’s the way the body looks. For example: It’s uncanny to Richard Foley how much at times Ron Tsolkas has begun to look like a snake with something ambitiously substantial sitting in its belly. And especially so now as he stands there staring up into the canopy of a tree as though assessing its potential digestive sanctuary (page 6). Or: His lip was cocked like a coat hanger’s hook had snagged it (page 21). Or this description of Foley’s prosthetic testicle: Foley had shown a handful of veteran officers how, by pulling his scrotum tightly around the synthetic ball, like suffocating someone with a plastic bag, the little crescent moon eclipsing a full moon that was Organico’s mark showed up under the bloodless skin like a coin’s face under fine latex (page 26). That leap to suffocating someone with a plastic bag, a murderous act, well, of course I can just see that. It bridges this early section, also, to others where violence (or the threat thereof) is vivid and frightening.

The anguish of the body also means pain. After being attacked by a frantic, territorial magpie, Richard Foley’s head injury is described. The split helix above Foley’s ear lobe was stamped together with a fine grey thread under a thin white paste that made it look like lips pursed in anger (page 67). Or Len Hansen’s anxious plucking at his own skin: He’d managed to reveal not only a good fillet of his hand’s raw flesh but to have been for some while pinching and releasing with his left hand’s thumb and forefinger the soft little white bone that ran over the knuckle of his right index finger like a slide guitar string (page 72). Or Melanie Hodge’s self-torture by exercise: Melanie Hodge was trembling and heaving, her heart thrashing inside her chest like a lunatic in a flooding chamber, a panic of overexertion seeming to have thrust itself inside her like a hand up a puppet’s skirt (page 234) and …her tongue hanging as slack and foamy as a fatally wounded bull’s as it contemplates a matador’s taunting (page 236).  

Nicholas John Turner is the cartographer of a delirious, near-future Brisbane where a strange thing has happened. Somebody has dressed a giant in an old rugby referee uniform and boots that are so small the giant’s feet have to be broken to fit inside. They’ve then stuffed that giant person into a small blue hatchback car. When double-o observation officer Richard Foley discovers the blue hatchback and its inexplicable contents blocking the traffic of a busy city intersection, the mystery begins. Every character Turner shines a light upon in the long course of the novel has some sort of connection to this event. Some links are obvious. Others are implied for the attentive reader. I’ll come back to the plot.

In the wide range of English language fiction of the last 30 years, Infinite Jest is the book that most bears comparison to Let the Boys Play. Turner is not a maximalist like Wallace, though both novels are fairly epic. They knock on the same doors:

dysfunctional families

tennis/coaching vs. rugby/refereeing

the domination of corporations (or a single corporation) over all aspects of daily life

drug addiction

David Lynch territory surrealism

Like Wallace’s massive 1996 novel, Let the Boys Play doesn’t ever neatly resolve like a mainstream crime thriller would. It glories in the ambiguity it throws off. There are two big events that need solving. One is the murder of a sex worker outside Australia. The other is the giant in the blue hatchback. These are connected, but the investigation of the connection is hilariously weird since interest in both cases passes basically involuntarily from one investigator to another (via a strange, small, round object) and none of those people are police in the sense we’d use that word.

Richard Foley opens the novel. He is a double-o, which appears to stand for Observation Officer, a role within the bureaucratic hierarchy of Organico’s control of the municipality. He’s not a cop. Brisbane no longer has police. We’re told later (in reference to the sex worker’s murder, they’ve still got [cops] over there, you know (page 87). So, cops exist, but not in Australia, and Foley isn’t one. His interest in the giant stuffed into the blue hatchback is not concern for the well-being of the man or finding out who hurt him. In fact he has a professional inability to intervene (page 20). He’s instead interested, since it is his job to be, in observing the scene like an insurance adjuster, noting things that might be used for or against Organico in a court room.

Turner is a genius of side-eye characterization, and we get great views of Foley’s foibles, quirks and failings from the POV of his partner Ron Tsolkas and from Foley’s girlfriend. Tsolkas of course tells the testicle story mentioned above. He’s a veteran double-o who thinks Foley is terrible at his job. Melanie Hodge is Foley’s devoted girlfriend. He clearly does not deserve her love. She takes care of him after the magpie attack leaves him on injured leave from work. Her slow drift away from him over the course of hundreds of pages is, for me, the heart of this novel. Here’s an extended passage that gives a good sense of Turner’s writing style.

Melanie Hodge emerged from the kitchen. [Foley] stared at the table’s abandoned arrangement, a presumption of general injustice radiating off him like heat from compost. Yet seeing this all-too-familiar look of betrayal well on his face ranked a distant second in terms of her immediate frustrations; unaware that he’d followed her out of bed, she was thrown into mourning the pair of steaming buttermilk pancakes with Okon syrup and salted lime that she’d just pulled off the skillet, which until that very moment in her mind’s wanton eye she had been all but three bites into with her feet up watching something on the Toob in solitude. As he lifted his eyes and saw her she sighed and lowered her head and keeled a little forward as though felled by a sniper, her plate extended to him more or less involuntarily. Richard Foley received the offering like an increment of a large debt, nodding, and set about balancing it on his lap. He asked, as though inconsequentially, what time she’d got in last night. She writhed uncomfortably at his feet, humouring him, despite herself.

Somehow over the years Melanie Hodge had come to agree that Richard Foley was entitled to audit her like this. And that she would, as a basic premise of her care, endeavour to repair him along the fractures his asking described. It was the only thing he ever really demanded of her. There was something quite moving about it, a way for him to be vulnerable through a prism of assertion, and to remain dignified in pursuing his insecurity. And she had never much minded reaching across the threshold of his pride to comfort him. But as she looked up from the floor, sidestepping his questions and watching fragrant mouthfuls of her breakfast wriggle down his throat, Melanie Hodge found herself thinking that his entitlement had reached a point of total condescension. That he seemed more or less to be prodding at her as she scurried around the base of a jar. She hated him sometimes.

Foley went to boarding school with Len Hansen, the other major POV character in the novel. Len is a drug addict who spends much of the novel either naked or dressed in improbable, eclectic costumes thrown mindlessly together. He jokes about the humorless business of self-consciousness obliteration, in which he was expert (page 34). There’s a scene of Len getting high with his dealer Rocky Morat in which Rocky passes his knowledge of the novel’s gruesome murder to Len and, like some weird flu bug of inspiration, Len’s curiosity about the crime becomes an obsession. Len also takes possession of the cork pea from inside a referee’s whistle, the crime’s only piece of physical evidence, and the pea becomes an emblem of the narrative interest itself.

Len spends the greater part of his time with a small group of local rugby referees who just might, the foreign cops suspect, have among their number a cruel and vicious killer. What transpires is a farcical investigation that is as ridiculous as it is riveting. Len has to do much of his thinking addled, which is a chore not unlike lifting a shoe sucked deeply in mud. Despite this, he notices things. You can tell how much fun Turner had drawing this crowd of characters, painting them with the little details that make fiction magical.  

We get Leena: Leena’s acknowledging wave is a little arachnid thing of the hand, and it settles Jill the way an owner’s hand settles the worst of a jittery lapdog’s jittering (page 126). Here’s Owen Lane: Owen Lane more often than not has the look of something abandoned by its animating force, slack-faced and slouching as totally as a puppet (page 132). Or: Owen looked like a large insect that had earned the ire of an ant colony (page 143). Of Rory DeWitt: He has the smug look about him of someone being sold something that he knows more about than the salesman does (page 135). Jerry Pillwinkle jogging: … Jerry Pillwinkle who circled the field in a manner that was too mechanical to be intentional, like a wind-up boat left circling an abandoned bathtub (page 156). I could go on and on. Len’s investigation of this crowd is slow and often frustrated. He ultimately loses interest in the crime when he becomes fascinated by Corban Archer, the youngest referee, a young man with a near-errorless officiating record, who seems to have a gift for seeing things before they happen.

For months, Len boards a commuter train on a weekly basis to visit Corban Archer in the house where he lives with his keeper, Aunt Jacqui. They don’t talk much, but the chats they do have are spiritual and remind me of similar conversations on the campus of the Enfield Tennis Academy in Infinite Jest. Corban tells Len what he learned through close referee observation, about rugby’s one idea.

I came to understand that this game has many rules and laws, but only one condition, one idea. That idea is that possession of the ball is never a right. At no point is there such a thing as ‘entitlement’ to the object of the contest. This is scripture; every man on the field, at every moment, by unassailable lawful means, can pursue possession for himself. It may even be true to say that this is what it is for rugby to be ‘played.’ To fight, in the classical sense, without protection of privilege or access to insurance, by means of willfulness and guile, for the transportation of an object that is worth precisely nothing in the place where it is contested (page 319).

You can bend that vision of desire to fit any of the throng of people in this book. I haven’t touched on a quarter of them. I haven’t mentioned some of the most intriguing like the ex-rugby-Premier-level player cash sweeper L. Gato and his violent temper or Glenda Cheever whose life is told in a 20-page short story inserted near the end. It’s a wonderful book, a rare treasure in the self-published sphere, my favorite novel of 2024 that I have read this year.