It’s counterintuitive to find Beckett in an Australian maximalist, but Toltz’s black humour, keen eye for the absurdity of existence and intimate exploration of physical suffering can’t help but bring him to mind. “You’re on earth, there’s no cure for that!” as Hamm says in Endgame. As the suicide attempts stack up and his two great fears, prison and hospital, become horribly realised, he starts to worry that he is either immortal or already dead. It is incident rather than plot that saturates Quicksand, with the twin engines of the book Aldo’s death drive and life force. “I’m not interested in plots,” says Liam, trying to wrestle Aldo’s story into shape (“That’s convenient,” Aldo fires back). Plough fields, fight off hard Viking penises, bake.”) (“Aldo thinks about the things women have had to do throughout history with dead babies inside them. The irony is dark enough to begin with – Aldo is accused of raping a schoolmate while still a virgin – and only gets blacker, perhaps reaching its nadir when he encourages his singer-songwriter wife to perform on stage just after they’ve discovered their unborn baby has died, and somehow finds himself giving her a double thumbs-up of encouragement while she does so. A million entrepreneurial ideas bite the dust wives walk away in terminal disappointment the blows of fate range from a cake-fork to the jugular during a Buddhist wedding through to cancer, bereavement and prison rape. ![]() ![]() Like Tibor Fischer’s characters, Aldo and Liam are connoisseurs of their own cosmic despair, deadpanning their way through each new disaster. The rest of the book reveals – through Liam’s novel-in-progress, police interrogation transcripts, murder trial testimony, “interlocking anecdotes in excremental detail” and even an ill-advised poem – where it all went so very wrong. Now Aldo is out of prison and in a wheelchair, scarred literally and metaphorically from head to toe by fortune’s slings and arrows. Liam has been a captive audience for the motormouthed Aldo, a man who speaks in rapid-fire aphorism (“My conscience is clean: I change it every week”), since the pair met as teenagers. (“He turns to me and says, ‘I’m nobody’s muse.’ I think: that’s a great line right there.”) Likewise, the new one opens in a Sydney bar with a virtuoso display of the Aldo-and-Liam double act, as Aldo rattles out yet more of his terrible business ideas (disposable toilets, Ouija boards with spellcheck, iris-recognition chastity belts) and Liam, a perennially blocked writer who has become an unlikely cop after enrolling at police training school as research for a novel, proposes writing his friend’s life story. ![]() That book announced the arrival of a writer who could combine epic range with an unstoppable sentence-by-sentence energy. Quicksand follows Toltz’s Booker-shortlisted 2008 debut, A Fraction of the Whole, which also detailed the misadventures of monumentally unlucky brothers in arms against the backdrop of a caustically drawn contemporary Australia. And despite his best friend Liam’s assurances, it’s a question that will cross the reader’s mind more than once in a relentlessly garrulous tragicomic saga about friendship, failure, creativity and endurance that is both brilliant and exhausting. ![]() Is there no end to these words of yours, to your long-winded blustering? Job 8:1.” “I totally wasn’t thinking that.” Aldo Benjamin, the larger-than-life antihero of Steve Toltz’s second novel, has more reason than most to quote the Book of Job: his entire existence can be summed up as “a disaster waiting to happen, or a disaster that had just happened, or a disaster that was currently happening”.
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