Tom is in insurance. Things turn bad when he checks up on a highly insured horse that dies unexpectedly and is quickly buried. There are sock-fulls of cash involved. He’s also got a failing marriage and a young boy, Frank, who he is meant to be collecting from school, but he is late because the gangsters are after him. I feel no sympathy for this character. Yet.
The Century is an old cinema and the story’s second narrator, Spud, has a wrecking ball. I don’t much like Spud either. He and the team are coming in at night and working around the back, away from street view, to delay the inevitable protests. She’s a lovely old theatre. Spud went there as a kid. He’s not one for nostalgia though, and enjoys the way the ball collapses into the wall. Spud’s a hoarder and a wheeler-dealer; he takes bits of the plaster-work home, the seats from the auditorium, the toilets. Plans to find a buyer for the stuff. His back section is a junk yard and relationship with wife Kimbo is stretching to breaking point. We learn early on that Spud has issues he’s dealing with: addictions, a father who walked out. He does adore daughter Lucy, though, which helps take the edge off this otherwise hopelessly cynical bloke.
All of this takes a while to get going, but hang in there. You are in good hands. You’re just being set up. There is a very clever plot twist mid-story and all the things you can’t quite fit together slam into place and it is kind of laugh out loud funny while being terribly sad at the same time. There’s Tom telling a woman he’s picked up that she’s a bit older than he’d usually choose and the man has done so many stupid things in his life he shouldn’t get any sympathy from the reader at all. But, well. You wait.
The blokey feel to the storytelling I found refreshing, what with the horse-racing and the gangsters who appear to have kidnapped young Frank and the casually sexist view of women that both Tom and Spud seem to share, although we soon learn it is Kimbo who calls the shots in Spud’s life. For that, he’s a lucky man.
The misunderstandings multiply. When Tom reports that his son is missing the police fiddle with their software admin. It’s dead funny. I still concerned with the missing kid and Sarkies is making me laugh:
‘First things first—’
‘First things first? My son might have been abducted! First things first—’
‘Calm down—’
‘Why is no one taking this seriously?’
A policewoman says to the other two, ‘I’ll handle this, okay?’ and the other policewoman says, ‘What’ll I type into the palmtop?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘I’m not putting in an incomplete.’
‘Check the complete box and just write up the details under Notes.’
‘How do I do that?’
‘Control shift N.’
‘Which one’s control?’
‘The one with the squiggle.’
‘Okay,’ the policewoman says and two of them leave.
Sarkies is a playwright and screenwriter and it shows in the dialogue, which is superb, the voices distinct and edgy. No mean feat when the story twists so suddenly to give the reader an entirely different outlook on our two men. My distaste for each of them evaporated in an instant. They were still Tom and Spud talking the same shit with the same problems, but all my judgy narrow-mindedness flipped up to slap me in the face.
It’s a rare storyteller who can make me feel small in my own hammock. Sorry Spud, sorry Tom. I misjudged that.
I’d recommend The Demolition of the Century for book clubs, particularly if there are blokes in the group. It’s clever, poignant, truthful. I’m not going to give spoilers, but the family issues that are raised would spark a good discussion for sure.
Cristina Sanders' blog 