A Fraction of the Whole (#122)

A Fraction of the Whole by Steve Toltz


What I said then:

One of those books that was huge when it first appeared, but seems to have sunk without trace since. That doesn’t bode well.

What I say now:

This book's greatest strength is its hilarious tone. Told in two alternating first-person voices, the narrators are a father/son pair of cynical, sarcastic, misanthropic bastards. And they're fucking funny. Even more than that, Toltz's style of humour is something I haven't come across before. I actually think it might be a specifically Australian thing: he combines snideness (snidity?) with bluntness in a way that feels distinctly Aussie to me. Sample quote: "Let's not mince words: the interior of the Sydney casino looks as if Vegas had an illegitimate child with Liberace's underpants, and that child fell down a staircase and hit its head on the edge of a spade." There were any number of laugh-out-loud moments scattered throughout the book, wholly original turns of phrase that had people edging away from me on the tram as I cackled away.

Unfortunately, the book's greatest strength is also its greatest weakness. While a hell of a lot happens to the unfortunate Martin and Jasper Dean, they narrate the lot with such ironic detachment that it's impossible to be moved by any of it. They're too clever for their own good ... or, for the good of the book, at least.

The book is 700 pages long and jam-packed with incident: young loves lost and won, comas, bushfires, wives blown up with grenades, renegade uncles becoming latter-day-Ned-Kelly-esque folk-hero criminals, a friend marrying a thinly-veiled James Packer imitation, and I've barely scratched the surface. But no matter what happens, it has no emotional hold on me as a reader because it has no emotional hold on the characters themselves. They're too busy analysing events, and commenting on them, and thinking up a wonderfully bizarre metaphor to describe them, to ever let themselves be touched by them. And if the characters don't appear to care, why the hell should I?

Ultimately, I felt like this book was all icing, no cake. Which was a shame, because it had some of the most kick-arse icing I've ever come across. Oh well ...

(side note --- why do we use 'jam-packed' to describe something that's packed tight? I mean, I guess jam is packed pretty tight, but so are a lot of things. Why not Honey-packed? Vegemite-packed? Nutella-packed? Girlfriend-wanting-to-take-seven-pairs-of-shoes-on-a-weekend-trip-packed? Or, this being the 21st Century and all, how about vacuum-packed? Why the fuck is jam the universal measure of close-packing? Anybody?)

Cheers, JC


about to read: Burmese Days by George Orwell
books to go: 121