Underbelly Razor meets A Place Called Home, John Byrne’s sweeping novel, THE YOUNGEST SON takes the sag out of saga and with unrelenting pace and sheer page turning energy, delivers a powerhouse performance of epic proportion.
Propelled by a pacy, punchy prose, THE YOUNGEST SON starts in April 1929 and speeds relentlessly to its epilogue in November 1944. It’s a fifteen year span of felony, faith, feuds, friendships and family. Phew!
THE YOUNGEST SON is basically the tale of Big Bob Leach and his two older siblings, John and Maureen. John, saintly and studious, with a big streak of social justice strives for a vocation in the Catholic priesthood. Maureen dreams of a glamorous life fuelled by the glitz and glamour of the silver screen. And Bob just seeks to survive in the savage reality of the world.
Just as in life, their dreams and aspirations don’t go entirely to plan, and their journeys take extraordinarily different paths. In the roiling years of the Great Depression that feed into the Second World War, these three encounter the seedy Sydney underworld of bent cops, illegal betting, boxing fixes, and sly grog and brothels.
Disillusioned with the deity, John finds a deadly duty as a soldier at Tobruk and on the Kokoda. Maureen finds that all that glistens is not gold and that behind every silver screen dream there’s a black cloud nightmare. And Bob, through brawn and brain, rises like some fearful phoenix out of the ashes of fearsome opponents.
There’s a spontaneous combination of quick jab prose mixed with a crisp clean uppercut of character that Byrnes leads with and never lets go, full of the exhilarating urgency of a hard and fastie.
It’s a staccato style reminiscent of James Ellroy, terse, slang driven sentences and a gleeful blurring of the moral line between the malevolent and benevolent, the scary and the scarred, the conformist and the contrarian.
Character, pace and sense of place makes this a mesmerising read.
Start THE YOUNGEST SON at bedtime and say so long to sleep. Start it on Saturday and kiss your weekend goodbye.
THE YOUNGEST SON by John Byrnes is published by Macmillan.
