The misadventures of two unlucky brothers in arms make for a tragicomic saga about friendship, failure, creativity and endurance
‘I know what you’re thinking. Is there no end to these words of yours, to your long-winded blustering? Job 8:1.” “I totally wasn’t thinking that.” Aldo Benjamin, the larger-than-life antihero of Steve Toltz’s second novel, has more reason than most to quote the Book of Job: his entire existence can be summed up as “a disaster waiting to happen, or a disaster that had just happened, or a disaster that was currently happening”. And despite his best friend Liam’s assurances, it’s a question that will cross the reader’s mind more than once in a relentlessly garrulous tragicomic saga about friendship, failure, creativity and endurance that is both brilliant and exhausting.
Quicksand follows Toltz’s Booker-shortlisted 2008 debut, A Fraction of the Whole, which also detailed the misadventures of monumentally unlucky brothers in arms against the backdrop of a caustically drawn contemporary Australia. That book announced the arrival of a writer who could combine epic range with an unstoppable sentence-by-sentence energy. Likewise, the new one opens in a Sydney bar with a virtuoso display of the Aldo-and-Liam double act, as Aldo rattles out yet more of his terrible business ideas (disposable toilets, Ouija boards with spellcheck, iris-recognition chastity belts) and Liam, a perennially blocked writer who has become an unlikely cop after enrolling at police training school as research for a novel, proposes writing his friend’s life story. (“He turns to me and says, ‘I’m nobody’s muse.’ I think: that’s a great line right there.”)
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