Asking for Trouble (2014), by Peter Timms
The latest instalment in the politics of entitlement in the Oz literary scene is an article claiming that it's necessary to live in Sydney or Melbourne to be successful.  It's had more publicity than it deserves IMO, but amongst other rebellious thoughts I won't bore you with I have now forgotten, it made me think,…
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The latest instalment in the politics of entitlement in the Oz literary scene is an article claiming that it’s necessary to live in Sydney or Melbourne to be successful. It’s had more publicity than it deserves IMO, but amongst other rebellious thoughts I won’t bore you with I have now forgotten, it made me think, here we go again with the idea that literary prizes define success and therefore they ought to be ‘fair’. Not only must acclaim be gender neutral, now it must be evenly distributed among the states and territories. As if there were some kind of curve of normal geographical distribution that applies to literary genius…

(The Americans demanded their ‘fair’ share of the Nobels so long and so hard (and so irrationally) that the judges finally gave in last year just to shut them up, and by doing that made fools of themselves and the prize, not to mention demoralising the current literary greats of the USA).

I digress. *chuckle* It’s so easy to do on a blog!

Tasmania. For anyone who knows anything about Australian literature outside of Sydney and Melbourne, that’s really all I need to say to rest my case, (though I could just as easily make my case around WA or Qld or SA or even Canberra not to mention regional authors scribbling away in the Blue Mountains or Woodend et al). But since I love our Tassie authors dearly I will indulge myself by naming some names: Richard Flanagan, Amanda Lohrey, Christopher Koch, Christy Collins, Rohan Wilson, Favel Parrett, Heather Rose, Robin Mundy, Helen Hodgman, Sheridan Hay and Karenlee Thompson. That’s just the ones reviewed on this blog, otherwise we’d be here all day.

Every month the Tasmanian Writers Centre recommends some books to read:

Each month the TWC publishes four recommended reads on our website. Three of the recommendations are recent releases by a local Tasmanian writer, an Australian writer and a children’s writer. The fourth is a Tasmanian classic that you may not have got round to reading, or that you may not have read for a long time.

What’s more, they have a competition for giveaway books, and that’s how I heard about and won a copy of Peter Timm’s novel Asking for Trouble. (I’d just reviewed Peter Timm’s idiosyncratic In Search of Hobart in the City South Series, so I knew I liked his style).

Asking for Trouble is deceptively simple. Set mostly in 1950s Melbourne, the novel starts out with a crusty old narrator called Harry Bascombe reluctantly agreeing to be interviewed for a TV series investigating old crimes, and then it launches into his memories of childhood. I loved reading this, because this was the Melbourne that existed ten years before our family migrated here. I’ve been here so long now that people just assume I remember Menzies and the Olympic Games and the arrival of TV, but no, that was all before my time and so the rich domestic historical detail was a delight to read.

But even as I enjoyed the childhood dramas – the teachers good and bad, the friendships and the bullying, and the mysterious business of making sense of the adult world around Harry – my readerly brain was reminding me that there had been a crime, one noteworthy enough to interest a journalist over half a century later. The pages whizzed by, (and if there were clues I missed them entirely) until suddenly the book took a darker turn with the death of Harry’s mother in a car accident. Amid the nostalgia, this brought me up short: I had almost forgotten how many people used to die on our roads every year. Victoria’s 2016 road toll was 291 – a terrible number for all those who loved the victims and a number that doesn’t reveal the extend of trauma among the injured – but still an astonishing reduction from 1034 in 1969, the year that The Sun News-Pictorial ran one of the most effective newspaper campaigns waged in Australia. Declare War on 1034 was the slogan and it led to .05 blood-alcohol laws, random breath testing and compulsory seatbelts, and by being effective, changed the mindset that road deaths were inevitable. Since then we now target speed, drug-affected driving and fatigue, and our goal is a road toll of zero. So it was disquieting to see how everybody in Harry’s world just accepts a violent death in a road crash, and Harry, big-noting himself among his friends, knows so much about road deaths that he is able to describe his mother’s death convincingly even though he wasn’t there.

There are other signals that Harry’s narration is not entirely to be trusted. There’s a lot of self-justification going on which sits uneasily with the way he does rather too much blaming of others; he assumes a victimhood but doesn’t seem to mind it much; and the way he distances himself from feeling any emotion doesn’t quite seem to have been his choice as he claims. His hard-hearted attitude towards his intellectually disabled brother is another jolt out of nostalgia, not just because – authentically so – Harry uses words that we would never use these days (such as ‘mentally retarded) but also because his father simply puts Frankie in a ‘home’ after mother dies, and they then dismiss him from their lives. Harry never knows where Frankie was sent, or even if he is still alive, and despite his offhand and offensive way of describing Frankie, there are intimations that Harry was fond of him, and missed him, and regretted never asking his father where Frankie was.

Still, despite these hints and others that Harry is not just a curmudgeonly loner, the concluding scenes are a cunning surprise and suddenly this novel becomes a much darker exploration of the ‘innocence of childhood’. It’s quite unsettling…

You can find out more about Peter Timms at his website.

Author: Peter Timms

Title: Asking for Trouble

Publisher: Fourth Estate, Harper Collins, 2014

ISBN: 9780732298432

Source: won in a Tasmanian Writers Centre competition.