What first attracted me to Boyd Oxlade’s Death in Brunswick was its title. The simplicity intrigued me. It seemed raw, or something else, clinical, maybe cold. What follows is a narrative set in Melbourne. Carl, with his slicked-back hair and who, depending on the character, either looks like David Bowie or a drunk, bloated, pill-popping waster, is just scraping by, working at The Marquee as a chef – Shane Maloney tells us in the new introduction that this pub was the Bombay Rock:
‘The door was tended by bouncers only recently descended from the trees…The food was cooked eight weeks in advance and lit like a crime scene.’
Carl’s work environment is generally unhygienic and unsafe and his boss and the bouncers who work there constantly taunt him. On top of this, Carl’s dying mother decides to move in, something Carl begrudgingly accepts after learning about a possible inheritance. There is, however, one saving grace: Carl works with a young Greek waitress who occasionally brings him drinks and flirts with him. Then, things speed up. Carl falls out with a drug dealer and, cleaning late one night, he is confronted. Then, cue the title, the freak accident occurs. Carl doesn’t know what to do, so he calls his best mate Dave and together they go about fixing the ‘problem’.
Death in Brunswick is a fast book and the prose reads like a third person Bukowski. We are thrown into late eighties Melbourne; most of the plot is set in Brunswick, and the simplicity of the text, its dirty, surface-level realism, matches the temperament of Carl and Dave. Even by the second sentence, we learn what Carl thinks about Sydney: ‘He felt uncomfortable in that beautiful city and envied and despised the people he knew there’. And it’s this initial familiarity that continues to populate the entire narrative.
Initially, everything is quite bleak. There’s an almost-sadness that pervades the two characters, their situations, dead-end jobs, Carl’s nostalgia for the past. At the same time the book succeeds in satirising their lives, or, indeed, the lives of many: people who grew up with remarkable dreams only to slide into mediocrity. As the plot develops we are introduced to other characters, like Carl’s mum and Sophie, who round out the narrative and give other, if similarly bleak, outlooks on the Melbourne existence.
In a similar manner to Wake in Fright – indeed, it’s almost an urban companion text to Kenneth Cook’s rural nightmare – both books highlight failures in Australian society. Death in Brunswick succeeds in a achieving a certain amount of emotional depth, with each of the characters, in their own way, progressing to various ‘points of no return’ that result in drastic alterations of their lives.
Death in Brunswick is a book you can finish in two days. You can close the covers and put it on the bookshelf but when you least suspect it, when you’re sitting on the tram, going through Brunswick, walking around Melbourne General Cemetery, it’ll come back to you, the narrative – though 25 years old – still fresh, recognisable, both in the locations and characters it depicts.
Rating: 4 stars out of 5
Death in Brunswick
By Boyd Oxlade
Paperback, 224pp, RRP $12.95
ISBN 9781922079800
Text Publishing
