Book Review: My Brother Jack

My Brother Jack by George Johnstone (1964) 348 p.

There was a time when, as an aspiring writer, I felt obliged to read through all the “classics,” an enormous amount of which still clog up my Goodreads to-be-read list and a smaller but still voluminous amount of which have physically occupied my various homes over the years. Of course forcing yourself through The Canon is a young man’s game, one for which I’ve long since lost any motivation, but for the books I bothered to actually acquire I do still read them eventually. A second-hand copy of My Brother Jack that I probably bought in some dusty St Vincent de Paul’s has been floating around on my shelves for seven or eight years, but I only got around to it this week.

It was therefore an excellent surprise to find that My Brother Jack is not the slog I expected – some kind of antiquated family drama from a time when Australia still felt spiritually Edwardian, something that would drag me back to assigned high school English class reading – but is instead a downright literary achievement that is also a genuine pleasure to read, often reminding me of Peter Carey at his picaresque best. In what I suspect is a strongly autobiographical story, Johnstone’s novel follows young David Meredith through his childhood, adolescence and early adulthood in the Melbourne of the 1920s, Great Depression and Second World War, largely revolving around his sense of detachment and mis-belonging; especially in contrast to his older brother Jack, an effortlessly popular ordinary Australian bloke. David by contrast is a nerd, a writer, an effete; an aspirational bohemian, a boy who dreams of more than the stifling mediocrity of Australian suburbia. (I have to admit I found it very funny to consider anywhere five or six train stations from the Melbourne CBD as suburbia; but then perhaps I was lucky to grow up in the post-WWII car-oriented suburbs of Perth, as opposed to an Australian kid growing up in Port Hedland or the Wheatbelt or Oodnadatta. Mind you, David himself notes that the suburbs were “worse than slums… they lacked the grim adventure of true poverty.” Perhaps the real problem I had with Perth’s suburbs was that unlike Port Hedland or the Wheatbelt or Oodnadatta, they lacked the exoticism of true country remoteness.)

It feels curious to read literature set in this part of Australian history which is also set in a city. Our novels and films and television series are heavily weighted – unlike our actual population distribution – towards the bush and the Outback, in dutiful accordance with the national mythology. In any case, part of the pleasure of My Brother Jack – one which of course won’t chime as much with people who aren’t Melburnians – is seeing your own city, its familiar landmarks and streetscapes, as they were a full century ago:

It was an uneasy, muggy evening with a storm brewing, and the Remington seemed to weigh a ton, and the width of the carriage, which kept sliding and ringing the bell, made it very awkward to carry, and by the time I had staggered as far as Swanston Street the shops and offices were closing and it was the rush hour, with everybody pushing and jostling for the trams. The sultriness had made people irritable and nobody had much patience with me and my cumbersome burden, and it was quite some time before I was able to struggle aboard a Darling Road tram, and even then I had to stand with the typewriter still in my arms. We were crossing Prince’s Bridge when the conductor elbowed his way through the strap-hangers. The weather and the crowds had given him a fine temper, too, and he began to make a tremendous fuss when he saw me and wanted to kick me off at the next stop.

 

I found it very lonely walking the streets of my own city in a soft pale drizzle of rain… I had nothing to go back to at Beverley Grove – so I just went on despondently walking around until the dark became night and the street-lamps were blurred and blobby through the fine slide of rain, and the spires of St. Paul’s shone against the street-glow like the points of licked lead-pencils, and the coloured tram tickets at the street corners had been trampled and muddied into patchy little Braque-coloured collages, and I had the oddest sensation of being nowhere…

I don’t think this is the same as seeing, for example, New York City or London through a historical lens. Australia has an endless appetite for stories from the 19th century colonial frontier (less so the 19th century cities) or the boomer and Gen X nostalgia of the recent decades from about the 1950s or ‘60s onwards, but less so for the half-century in between those two periods. (We have plenty of war stories, but those necessarily take place abroad.) You rarely see it, and even more rarely do you see it done well – partly why I like Peter Carey’s Illywhacker so much. But Johnstone, through a combination of his personal memories and genuine raw talent, recreates the living and breathing Melbourne of a century past. He has a rare skill of bringing scenes and locations to life, whether told first-hand or second-hand: the titular brother’s desperate and impoverished journey from Sydney to Melbourne through the “grim wet forests of Cape Howe and Gippsland” after a failed attempt at fortune-hunting during the Depression; the bohemian apartment of a raffish art student on Spring Street; the neat and tidy suburbs of the respectable middle class, newly-built and with nary a tree in sight; the glorious Art Deco tower, topped by a copper cupola and statue of Prometheus, that houses a thriving print newspaper of the 1930s. (This last is based on the real-life office of the Argus, which still stands on the corner of Elizabeth and LaTrobe a stone’s throw from my own office, and which I must have walked past a thousand times without thinking twice.)

Johnstone also achieves, in a manner that reminded me of Patrick O’Brian, a way of illustrating the exterior broader world beyond the one his protagonist inhabits. When David is a rookie journalist assigned to the shipping beat he describes, in the uneasy climate of the 1930s, the first German vessel sailing into our own Port Philip Bay with the Swastika displayed, an ominous portent despite the fact that their passengers are largely “Australians or European businessmen or German-Jews fleeing from Hitlerism, and even under the new Swastika flag flying right there at the masthead they talked quite openly about the evils of Nazism…”

Yet the queer thing is that not one of the German ships was ever the same after that day. They were the very ships that I had watched in and out of the docks for years, the long graceful four-masters of the Norddeutscher-Lloyd, the Main and the Aller and the Neckar and the Mosel, and they were even the same jovial and efficient captains I had known for so long, but once they all started coming in under the Swastika a kind of sinister stain seemed to brush off on them, and one never went aboard them again without being oppressed by a feeling of uneasiness, of eyes watching, or mouths opening to ask a question, of jackboots rapping on the steel plates at the far dim ends of alleyways.

What propels My Brother Jack past a brilliantly-realised period piece and into the realm of a great novel is the way it moves from what initially appears to be the bog-standard holier-than-thou diatribe of a gifted kid straining to break free of his perceived suburban desert, and eventually makes it clear that this boy – now a very well-travelled and cosmopolitan man – is a bad person, and that in the back of his mind he knows it. The very final line of My Brother Jack must be one of the most devastating in Australian literature, delivered as it is by Jack himself, not in anger or in bitterness, but in completely and totally mistaken earnestness: “My brother Davy’s not the sort of bloke who ever let anyone down, you know.”

A truly excellent book. It’s always a pleasure to read a classic that turns out to deserve its reputation.