What would you expect from an author who earned a PhD focusing on the existential roots of noir? A treatise of dry and dusty death? Forget it.
Thesis done and dusted, what you get from Michael Caleb Tasker’s debut novel, JUST LIKE THE NIGHT is a pitch perfect, pitch black, black as night deep dive into love and hate, desperate fate and family ties.
Caper begins in America with a grifter, Ray, and his daughter, Sera, at a card game con that goes arse up. Father and daughter hightail it out of the States and end up in Australia. Years later, he’s holed up on the Hawkesbury and she’s in a prison cell in Sydney. Somewhere in between she has had a daughter, Lena, sired by an undesirable. In prison she has maintained peak physical condition, a buffer against the psychological strain of her estrangement from her delinquent daughter and absence of her doting dad.
Paroled, Sera is forbidden to see her daughter on account of the kid’s association with criminals. But maternal instincts kick in and her child’s protection trumps official provisions. She continues to maintain her fitness by running at every opportunity, eschewing mechanical transport to traverse great swathes of the city and attending a boxing gym. The gym is mainly legit but not strictly. There’s a side hustle of mixed martial arts with heavy betting.
Pugilism, punters, high stakes, high risk, you don’t have to get in the harbour to swim with sharks.
Michael Caleb Tasker’s JUST LIKE THE NIGHT, is pitch black, immense and immersive, delivered with gut punch prose and a sophisticated poeticism.
Wielding words like a blunt instrument, imbued with flinty dialogue that creates a potent combination with staccato sentence structure, there’s a pulsating rhythm; urgent, pungent, a facility to make you flinch.
It’s sad, and bleak and yet compulsively readable, with Sera dealing with the cards life has dealt her, adjusting, without surrender, to hostile and menacing circumstances. There’s a throwaway clarity and phrasing in the writing that gives it a visceral power.
JUST LIKE THE NIGHT by Michael Caleb Tasker is published by Allen & Unwin.
