Secret Men’s Business: Manhood: The big gig by John Marsden

‘This is the most urgently needed book of our time’, says the back cover of this short, non-fiction work of advice to adolescent males, whose subject is how successfully to become a real man. (This boast contrasts strangely with the counsel given not to brag.) My son, the one aged twelve, described the book as being about ‘the need to grow up into little John Marsdens’. There is some truth in my boy’s apercu. Part of the problem is that John Marsden’s tone of voice – authoritative, utterly direct, honest, aggressively self-confident, judgmental – presents himself, perhaps not deliberately, as a role model. But if Marsden were a dog, he’d be a pack leader, and you’d worry about letting him off the leash in the park, in case he made mincemeat of the nearest Rottweiler. Is this role model suitable to all young men? Marsden’s best-selling novels (‘The most popular author today in any literary field’, The Australian) reputedly reach audiences that middlebrow writers don’t get through to: kids who don’t normally read books, troubled kids, tough guys whose fathers used to beat them up, druggies, hooligans, you name it. I have no reason to suppose this is not true. His voice – firm, understanding, empowering, sometimes subversive – could be tailor-made to appeal to young people in revolt. So it may indeed be that he is just the man to teach younger people how to ‘become a man who is mature, independent, responsible and wise’. By and large, I believe he does it well, but something about the endeavour troubles me. His subversiveness runs quite deep, and many adult readers will no doubt find breathtaking the casual contempt Marsden evinces towards both schools and parents, the two main centres of authority in most young people’s lives. Not all schools and parents, only the ones that get it wrong. (His tone suggests that by Marsden standards that’s rather a lot.) On this subject –passim in the book – I felt a real case was being overstated, but sometimes I thoroughly agree with him. It is liberating to read a distinguished person, for example, dismissing the major self-help, positive-thinking industry in one offhand, succinct sentence: ‘I’m not suggesting you use any of that self-esteem rubbish.’ Mind you, there is sly humour – rather naughty-boyish – in Marsden’s more arrestingly subversive remarks, despite their poker-faced tone, seen especially in the ‘in your face’ sections of the debate. Even the book’s title looks deliberately designed to irritate both women and Aboriginal people. Marsden’s obvious pleasure in being confrontational perhaps clashes a little with the wisdom recommended as essential to true manhood. The most interesting chapter is the first and by far the longest, ‘Becoming a Man. The Big Gig’. Here proper manhood is most clearly defined, and the results have a quasi-political air about them. It is not so much a hidden agenda (hiding things not being Marden’s style), as a series of strategies which reminded me of two things, both in a way old fashioned. The first is Libertarianism, with its stress on self-sufficiency and self-discipline; I would diagnose Marsden as having read Robert Heinlein in boyhood. The second, more old fashioned still, is the boy-scoutish emphasis (that we know from schools like Timbertop, or Gordonstoun in Scotland) on a physical testing of oneself and one’s courage in mildly dangerous pursuits like trekking in dense bush and mountaineering. In this sort of educational ideology there is also an emphasis on social service, as there is at points in Marsden’s book (he was himself a Timbertop teacher), so it may be wrong to read Marsden as belonging to the Social Darwinist right. (However, Heinleinian Libertarianism also emphasises social service on the personal level, though it despises governmental welfare agencies.) Whatever his personal beliefs, there is a whiff of contempt in Marsden’s book for those who fail to get their act together, for losers in short. (These do not include gay men, about whom he writes sympathetically.) His chapter on Drugs is slightly disappointing (‘addiction, which means you’ve handed over control of your life to other forces. The mature person controls his own life’). This may be because he shows no empathy at all for the exhilarating effects of various drugs, and one senses he was never a user himself, and doesn’t fully understand the nature of the allure that leads to addiction in the first place. The chapter on Women is fine on menstruation and the clitoris (and gives a convenient glossary elsewhere of their slang equivalents, as he does with the many sexual matters touched on), but tells one very little about what women are like. Women seldom appear in the book, and when they do, while it is not merely as either sex objects or mothers, they do come across as curiously remote creatures to be treated with respect (and, the tone intimates, caution). What really troubles me is the suspicion that the book is elitist – there’s a good bit of public-school ethos in there – deceptively masquerading as populism. In addition, it is too macho for me. This is a harsh judgment to make of a book that is thoroughly decent in most ways, and maybe I am making an unnecessary meal out of something thoroughly well intentioned. It was my son, who read the book first, who showed me the scary bit entitled ‘You need to defeat your father’. He was a bit worried by this, and said he didn’t want to defeat me (‘wimp’, one hears Marsden muttering), but no doubt things will change, and perhaps Marsden will prove to be correct. Let’s hope it’s something painless like beating me at chess. I don’t fancy entering a marathon with him at my age. Or perhaps he’ll just beat me up. Peter Nicholls declares his interest: he has four sons.

Peter Nicholls

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