The Life by Malcolm Knox

How would Dennis Keith – or, if we’re using the language of legends, DK – characterise it? ‘The Life was this mythic world where you could surf as much as you want, every day, any day, go anywhere [...] Getting waves was everything, every day.’ In Malcolm Knox’s exceptional new novel, this world – with its singular focus, and its sacred ecstasies – is revealed in a language both new to Knox and rare in commercial Australian publishing. The book’s plot, for most of its length, is simplicity itself. Washed-up surfing legend Dennis Keith, a refugee hiding away in his mother’s retirement home, is snapped out of scattered lethargy by the arrival of a Dahl-soundalike, the BFO (that’s ‘Bi-Fricken-Ographer’ to you and me). Hesitant to proffer his story, he turns inward as the outside world increases its demands. The inner recollection to an invisible audience begins; we get the grommet years, the longing for surf, the nascent talent – and then the full blooming, and subsequent legend: Dennis Keith, DK, the best surfer in the world. Plot is one thing, mere reviewer’s necessity, but voice is another. Here is where the novel seduces and converts. It is a hard thing to capture in brief, as The Life accumulates in short chapters and short sentences, occasionally buffeted by longer lyrical stretches. In DK’s own words, his brain is ‘a pokie machine and it was random the way the words spun around and where they stopped’. The book operates in a similar fashion, a fury of impressions held together by Keith’s shattered yet insistent voice. In Keith, Knox has created a genuinely captivating narrator, one capable of both the lushest rhetorical gallops and cracked half-sentences. No matter what register DK adopts, his scrambled speech always somehow attains a dazed eloquence. There is the low register – his one-word sentences, or his constant, childlike use of the word ‘poo’. At other times, his words run away from him with a stoner’s delightful imprecision: when, describing music at a party, he says ‘the Hendrix and the Cream and the The Doors’, it is with a perfectly natural clumsiness that makes perfect sense, an everyday trip and fall that Knox captures again and again in his prose. There is also the higher and fiercer language, which, fittingly, only arrives when surfing is described: ‘the green cathedral’, ‘like buckets like a waterwheel scooping gallons’, ‘dropping in, surf ratting them, snaking, at this pristine break down middle of nowhere’. Keith’s voice slips between the first, second, and third person, often from paragraph to paragraph. If Knox’s previous books (notably A Private Man [2004]) generated narrative momentum by careful plotting and strategic cross-cutting, here it is via the hazy self-mythologising churn of DK’s mind. And it isn’t just alternately coarse and polished phrase-making that Knox is peddling in these chapters. Throughout, there is a restrained but insistent narrative urge, pushing us from youth to manhood, from dream and aspiration to experience and achievement. With such a strong character at the novel’s centre, and with such a fierce grasp on the story’s telling, DK’s relationships with others – his family and entire sub-cast of surfers and slackers – are never as strong as they could be. If the novel were happy merely to float with DK on his storehouse of memories, this might not pose a problem, but as the novel progresses, a few issues are raised. The novel does accelerate with incident in its second half, but this is accompanied by a slight decrease in interest. There are murders, buried guilt, and revelations – all the standard third-act work of much fiction – but while Knox deploys them skilfully, they are comparatively disappointing – somewhat conventional after the novel’s earlier freedoms. Nonetheless, there are a dozen other small touches that Knox captures beautifully throughout the book, such as the slowly encroaching professionalism and sponsorship of surfing, Queensland’s careless architectural growth in the 1970s, and the grace a purely physical being can experience at the height of his powers. As the book progresses and certain pills and powders catch up to DK, what astonishes is how he is still able to find clarity in surfing alone, long after everything else has passed him by. Some of the strongest sections of the book are the surfing contest set-pieces, which, like the cricket ones in A Private Man, gain power from Knox’s years as a Fairfax journalist. The author’s note contains a voluminous list of surfing titles that aided in the ‘construction of the Dennis Keith story’, but there is no doubt that Knox’s time spent ghosting Ben Cousins’s autobiography (2010) has played a part in the writing of the current novel. There has always been something of the well-behaved novelist about Knox – he is prodigious and assured, a dab hand across numerous genres and styles. I have read many of his books and been impressed with them all, but The Life signals something new and vital in his work. Compare the carefully wrought and balanced prose of his début Summerland (2000) to the freedom-in-the-mess of The Life, and it is clear Knox is on to something here. He has written a vivid and essential piece of work. CONTENTS: JUNE 2011

Adam Rivett

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