Johnno

By David Malouf

"Despite Johnno's assertion that Brisbane was absolutely the ugliest place in the world, I had the feeling as I walked across deserted intersections, past empty parks with their tropical trees all spiked and sharp-edged in the early sunlight, that it might even be beautiful ... " Johnno is a typical Australian who refuses to be typical. His disorderly presence can disturb the staleness of his home town or destroy the tranquillity of a Greek landscape. An affectionately outrageous portrait, David Malouf's first novel recreates the war-conscious forties, the pubs and brothels of the fifties, and the years away treading water overseas.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Queensland Press
• Release date: Nov 23, 2015
• ISBN: 9780702258022

David Malouf

David Malouf is the author of poems, fiction, libretti and essays. In 1996, his novel Remembering Babylon was awarded the first International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. His 1998 Boyer Lectures were published as A Spirit of Play: The Making of Australian Consciousness. In 2000 he was selected as the sixteenth Neustadt Laureate. His most recent novel is Ransom.

Reviews for Johnno

[mattyb_11 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Best novel about Brisbane ever. No question.

[edwinbcn · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Johnno is a short novel by the Australian author David Malouf . The chapters devoted to telling the story of the main character Johnno are embedded in a framework of two chapters, the first and the last describing the narrator's days mourning the death of his grandfather. These chapters create the setting for going through old things, papers and memories, and in this nostalgic mood the narrator remembers and tells the story of his classmate Johnno.Although the narrator, Dante, and Johnno seem each other's opposites, in their adventures they are complementary, with Danta mostly poised to admire Johnno's audacity and Johnno at times showing unexpected loyalty to Dante. The novel is a tribute to pure, male friendship.In this way, the novel tells the story of coming of age in the late 40s through early 60s, starting in Australia during the war and rather boring 50s, an opening up of an exciting stay on the European continent and final days back in Australia.

[vivl_6 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I love Malouf's writing. It is so simple, direct, honest and sympathetic.

"Dante" and Johnno - the one relatively steady and conservative in outlook, the other a spirited, irreverent (in so many ways) force of nature, are children together in 30s/40s Brisbane. Their lives entwine for some time and David Malouf shares their relationship with us. Johnno is a rebellious child who becomes a fairly unpleasant young man. Even so, he is strangely "attractive". Perhaps it is because he seems like something different - he's almost a sprite, or one of those Greek/Roman minor gods of the sulky and slightly malicious variety.

The thing that really attracted me about this book (aside from Malouf's beautiful writing), was not, however, the spirited Johnno (I can't say "free-spirited", as he spent his life seeking something, perhaps some extra thrill or risk that would really make him really BE, so he was never really "free") but rather the relationship of both young men with the changing face of their home town of Brisbane. Similar to Perth in so many ways, the charting of the changes and how they effected the lives of these young men for whom its landscape was the landscape of their youth struck a deep chord with me.

In particular, the following passage made me question my limpet-like attachment to Perth, a city which has become over time, since my birth in the early 1970s, a place whose urban landscape and societal values I actively dislike almost without exception. Like Dante, I have to ask myself, am I in a sort of state of suspended animation here? Have I never really "grown-up"?

"Brisbane, where I sometimes thought of myself as having 'grown-up', was a place where I seemed never to have changed. Just turning a corner sometimes on a familiar view, or a familiar sign [...] made me step back years and become the fourteen-year-old, or worse still, the twenty-year-old I once was, helpless before emotions I thought I had outgrown but had merely repressed. All my assurance, all my sophistication about foreign places and performances and food, like the growing heaviness round the shoulders, was a disguise that might fool others but could never fool me. Elsewhere I might pass for a serious adult. Here, I knew, I would always be an aging child. I might grow old in Brisbane but I would never grow up."

Unsettling thoughts.