Simon Baker
A Long Crawl
Danny Kelly, the main character in Christos Tsiolkas’s first novel since The Slap (2010), is a gifted swimmer born into a mixed-race, working-class Melbourne family. In 1994 he wins a scholarship to a private school (‘Cunts College’, as he refers to it), where he can be trained properly, the aim being to win gold at the Sydney Olympics in 2000. However, since the narrative starts in a shiftless present in which Danny has a criminal record, a flaky relationship and no clear prospects, we know that things probably do not work out.
At school he is not merely considered a bit different by the posh kids but also instantly and viciously (and not all that convincingly) hated and bullied. It is in the pool alone that things go well. Danny becomes the best of a talented bunch, winning the national under-16s’ title.
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
'He is persuaded by the idea that coffee, the most widely used psychoactive substance in the world, changed 18th-century European minds, catalysing a new material rationalism.'
@ajlees on Michael Pollan's new book, 'This is Your Mind on Plants'.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/never-mind-the-neurobollocks
'A publicist interviewed by Fairrie praises Collins and her heroines ... because these were "women who behaved like men". Is that supposed to be good, given how men behaved towards Collins?'
Peter Conrad reviews a new documentary about Jackie Collins.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/easy-writer
'Walk down your supermarket pet food aisle and you’ll be hard pressed to find a single brand that claims to be made with high-welfare meat. More expensive pet food should not be about spoiling our cats but about sparing the farmed beasts we feed them.'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/meattoo