I guess Dominic Hoey sets his street cred early on in this story by throwing in a couple of ‘cunts’, just in case readers mistake him for an IIML grad. That would be a mistake. You can’t study to write authenticity like this.
Hoey’s previous story, descriptively called Poor People With Money is about youngsters on the edge in Auckland, making bad choices and rocking the consequences on a wild ride to a village so small. It’s on my list of classics of the decade. Can he do it again?
Damn right. 1885 is another powerful story, again about a family falling through the cracks in Auckland and again, it is so tight on character you’ve got to wonder how much personal experience is behind these descriptions. Every dysfunctional family has a dysfunction all of its own and here Hoey draws them out, the complications and mess of their lives, always something holding them back from achieving their goals, success scuppered at every turn.
Our narrator is young Obi, eleven years old with a voice somewhere between Ponyboy Curtis and Demon Copperhead, all swagger and vulnerability but with that hint that we’re hearing an older and wiser version of himself looking back and making observations. Man, our family was fucked, this older self seems to be saying, but with kindness and forgiveness. Obi’s childhood sure gives a lot of scope for forgiveness. But there’s a chuckle too, at the mad scrapes the family get into. On one hand this is the story of relentless misery, on the other, it’s bloody funny.
“I’m going to get us some money too,” I said, trying to sound like I knew where life kept the spare keys.
Obi lives with his mother and father, who love each other, and his older sister who is exploring her goth side. Could be the formula for a happy family but the parents are ex-addicts and boozers with theft as their main source of income and a house bought on the proceeds of a robbery with repercussions. Robberies always have repercussions (see Poor People With Money) and this one is no exception. Obi hero-worships his dad, with reservations, and his dad loves Obi, but is a selfish prick. He’s also a poet, which gives me a daft hope he can be saved. If you asked me what he did I’d tell you he was a poet. Not like a job, because God knows he made fuck all money off it. Poetry was just something he had to do; eat, shit and write. Obi’s mother loves him deeply and helps him when life gets confusing. Mum could make sense of things; the way bad thoughts travel in packs, how words are a form of possession and how people have seasons just like the weather. But his mum lies dying in her bed.
Obi’s best friend, Al, keeps the story upbeat. Al’s a side-kick, he joins Obi’s hare-brained hunt for buried treasure, and cheers him on in a Spacies tournament. It’s very 1985. When there’s no food in the house, and that means every cupboard is really, totally, empty, he can always eat at Al’s. The are other kids on the scene, local feuds and rumbles. Obi’s sister goes feral. It’s quite a community.
The story is fine, but it’s the language that really hit me in the guts reading this book. “Dad, is Mum okay?” My words turned to mist in front of my face. “Yeah, of course,” he smiled, like fresh paint on a burning house.
Break my heart! This kid. This book. Another classic.
Cristina Sanders' blog 