Accessibility Tools

  • Content scaling 100%
  • Font size 100%
  • Line height 100%
  • Letter spacing 100%

Falling into a dream

Joel Deane’s visceral novel
by
November 2023, no. 459

Judas Boys by Joel Deane

Hunter, $27.95 pb, 229 pp

Falling into a dream

Joel Deane’s visceral novel
by
November 2023, no. 459

Early in Joel Deane’s third novel, the point of view shifts from the first to the third person as the narrator, Patrick ‘Pin’ Pinnock, reflects on a moment in boyhood, standing atop a diving board at night:

He looks down and sees the white frame of the rectangular pool, but everything inside the white frame is black. The darkness within the frame is his past and future, he thinks, and the diving board is his present. To make the leap from one to the other, therefore, is an act of faith.

This ‘act of faith,’ however, suggests agency, control – a capacity to choose, from the platform of the present, to revisit the past or traverse the future despite not knowing what one will find. Deane’s protagonist lacks such agency. Instead, it is his present that is blackest. The question is to what degree the traumas that ravage him offset Pin’s reprehensible behaviour.

Judas Boys

Judas Boys

by Joel Deane

Hunter, $27.95 pb, 229 pp

From the New Issue

You May Also Like

Leave a comment

If you are an ABR subscriber, you will need to sign in to post a comment.

If you have forgotten your sign in details, or if you receive an error message when trying to submit your comment, please email your comment (and the name of the article to which it relates) to ABR Comments. We will review your comment and, subject to approval, we will post it under your name.

Please note that all comments must be approved by ABR and comply with our Terms & Conditions.