Brigid
Delaney’s 2014 debut novel, ‘Wild Things’, is a riveting read. The premise from
the blurb - a group of well-to-do university boys haze a foreign student during
a weekend away from the college dorm - suggested perhaps a salacious read, but
within a few chapters I was fully immersed in this sophisticated, tense, and
often foreboding thriller.
Delaney
is a journalist for The Age, the Sydney Morning Herald, and The Guardian among
others. Her bio also says she has worked as a lawyer. I would think both these
professions put her in good standing to write on this topic; presumably Delaney
has used material from recent events at St John’s College at Sydney University,
and hazing rituals uncovered at Sydney’s Trinity Grammar boarding school which
made headlines some years ago and spurned other works of fiction based on its
alarming history of bullying. I would also hazard to suggest her knowledge of
the type of private school personalities who enter the legal profession may
also have influenced this novel, and it is telling that her two central
characters, Toby and Ben, are both studying law at the fictional college St
Anton’s. They are archetypal ‘big men on campus’: Ben, born to wealth and a
boarding school veteran, and Toby, the handsome and smart country boy who
ingratiates himself into Ben’s ‘old boys’ group by being sporty and
charismatic. The novel opens with Ben and Toby’s clique, largely composed of
the rowing and cricket team, travelling to a college property in the bush,
where the intention is to drink, take drugs and get up to hijinks commonly
regarded as ‘male bonding’. Delaney centres much of the plot around the
relationship between Ben and Toby, in part to analyse the intensity of male
friendship, but also to catalogue the decline of the friendship in parallel to
the decline of the group after the fateful weekend trip:
‘Ben
had become like another brother. By second year the new fresher girls had
difficulty telling them apart. Toby had darker hair and was two inches shorter,
but through playing the same sports, studying for the same degree, having the
same friends and sleeping with the same girls they became indistinguishable.
Not that Toby minded: when there were two of them, it made him feel stronger.’
Both
have had casual relationships with the women in their social circle, and their
complex attitudes towards women are really insightfully articulated by Delaney.
She writes of Ben’s struggle to accept his desire towards the more ‘serious’
girls in the college: ‘But he felt the same way meeting the young Amnesty
International women: maybe the worst are full of passionate intensity, but they
are also doe-eyed and lovely, with mouthfuls of marvelous intentions. Five
minutes with them and he felt inspired to actually do something with his law
degree – to visit prisoners, to fight oppressive regimes, to one day appear at
the International Criminal Court in the Hague, verbally eviscerating some fat
war criminal’.
The
casual way sex is undertaken in the plot, footnoted by both the male and female
characters’ confusion regarding their feelings towards the notion of the ‘no
strings hook up’, places this novel well and truly in the contemporary sphere.
Delaney tackles this subject, as well as the way many women are waking up to
the inequity in the hook up culture, candidly. I thought her reading of
contempoirary culture, her incorporation of social media into the plot line,
and her dialogue of the Gen Y characters was spot on. Her description of a
university ball was painfully sharp:
'The
boys would sit at the tables in their teams and packs and talk about girls and
football and their older brothers. They’d get drunk and get pulled onto the
dance floor before they remembered they didn’t know how to dance. So a girl
with too-tanned skin dressed like a butterfly would dance around them while
they stood swaying and shuffling, unsure where to place their hands'.
Small
details lifted Delaney’s characterisations from the ordinary and from my experience
growing up in one of Sydney’s more well-heeled suburbs and attending Sydney University,
I smiled wryly at her apt analogy from Toby’s perspective of feeling a surge of
energy, like when one is about to ski ‘down the black run’: only rich kids ever
feel that way. Certainly, that’s how I thought the rich kids lived life as I
watched from my public school distance, as far away as I could from the Rugby
team thugs at university.
The
central event of the plot is grim and to read this novel in entirety is
rewarding but also emotionally demanding. Delaney makes her characters ask some
big questions about morality, ethics, religion, sexuality and elitism:
‘Toby
was aware (how could he not be) of the case of the cruise ship woman. Sex, a
drug overdose on a ship, a group of men…Sometime in the night she died and they
did nothing – they closed ranks, they vowed not to talk, despite immense moral
and legal pressure. Did he want to be like those men?’
And
while I would say that this is a very plot driven book, the writing is
beautifully atmospheric and at times when Delaney is describing the ethereal landscape
of the students lounging around the lovely college grounds, I felt there was a
comparison to the dreamy quality of Jeffrey Eugenides ‘The Virgin Suicides’:
'But
outside nothing had changed. There were still girls sitting in a circle
drinking wine from a thermos, haloed in wintry sunlight, dandelion pollen
suspended in mid-air, the peacock strutting on the lawn, suddenly interested in
the plants. The gardener was laughing and petting the peacock and the girls
were laughing too and the pollen was falling'.
This
is a fantastic novel, one which stayed with me for days after finishing, and I
really look forward to reading more of Delaney’s work.
*This review is part of the Australian Womens Writers Challenge 2014
No comments:
Post a Comment