FICTION
Judas Boys
Joel Deane
Hunter, $27.97

For admirers of Anna Kavan, best known for Ice (a surreal post-nuclear feminist novel which feels more like a medieval poem than a conventional dystopia), it is always delightful to encounter someone else who has read her work. Her most famous book is one of the main motifs in Joel Deane’s graceful new novel, Judas Boys.

Like the ice of Kavan’s novel, the world is closing in on Deane’s protagonist, Pinnock. And though ice is rarely seen in Melbourne, the upper-middle-class suburbia of the book is emotionally frozen to its core. Pinnock (“Pin”) has been dismissed as a staffer in Canberra, but we do not know why. He faces opprobrium from all quarters: his ex-wife Jill; his daughter Anna, a devotee of Kavan, and his old schoolfriend and boss Cox, now a government minister.

In desolating circumstances, Pinnock experiences a cascade of memories in which he eventually takes solace. Most of his flashbacks are to formative years at St Jude’s, a Catholic private school, and in particular to his friendship with fellow student OB (O’Brien), who, as we know from the start, took his own life at 19.

This is a spare and elusive book. There is sleight of hand in the structure, which moves backwards and forwards in time and leaves copious space for readers’ imaginations. It will surprise no one that Deane is best known as a poet – the prose is winnowed, the settings evoked in cool noir-like detail.

In the St Jude’s chapters, Deane shows us the alternate vulnerability and brutality of boys being groomed for power, boys whose pride and egos depend on concealing – in some cases strangling – their own humanity. That characters in a cut-throat environment are drawn with realism and even tenderness is one of the book’s strongest achievements.

St Jude’s anticipates an all-too-familiar Australian political and social elite. Cox is at the top of the pecking order. “Cox is a trophy hunter,” Pinnock explains. Such entitlement becomes chilling when Cox casually reveals to Pinnock graphic rape and domination fantasies about OB’s mother. It is one of many examples of violence intruding on a veneer of innocence and is portrayed without a flinch.

Some elements of the book are more personal to our protagonist. The adult Pin is racked with guilt over his professional failures and OB’s death. The younger Pin is haunted by his Catholic mother’s emotional abuse and takes refuge in the more comforting, though equally dangerous, attentions of OB’s mother. No one in the book is very likeable, yet all are human in their desires and resentments.