Boy Swallows Universe

Well that was captivating.

Connections are at the heart of this story. The relationships are filled with hurt, betrayal, trauma, forgiveness, loyalty and love. It's a weird thing to be charmed by a story that has some quite dark and sinister content, but such is the effect of Eli and August on the Reader's experience of this book. I came to rely on August because he told us repeatedly that 'it gets good after this', as at times I was fearful that the ending I needed wouldn't eventuate. Eli loved so fiercely that it was impossible not to feel emotionally invested in his journey and I loved the bonds he had with the men in his life. It was wonderful to see hardened criminals that society can make a lot of negative assumptions about, show more opening up and showing so much vulnerability, gratitude and love. I thoroughly enjoyed this slightly magical and wonderfully written novel. show less

My book club chose this book to read for December 2024 based on the recommendation of one of the members. That's one of the best reasons for belonging to a book club, exposure to a book that had not crossed your consciousness before.

This book tells the tale of Eli Bell who lives in Queensland, Australia. If, like me, you think of Queensland as an idyllic place of beaches and tropical rainforests, this book will upend your beliefs. Bell and his older brother, August, live in a suburb of Brisbane, Darra, a community of Polish and Vietnamese immigrants that seems to mostly run on the drug trade. And we're not just talking about marijuana and ecstasy; heroin is the drug of choice for many of the inhabitants. Both Eli's mother and his show more stepfather use heroin and sell it. The only saving grace is the ex-con, Slim, who takes the boys under his wing. (Slim is a real person celebrated for making the most prison breaks in Australian history.) August doesn't speak but he does write in the air and when Eli reads what he writes it may not make sense at the time but months or years later it will. Their father has been out of their life for at least 6 years.However, when their mother goes to jail for drug-dealing and then their stepfather is disappeared by the local drug lord, Tytus Broz, the boys are sent to live with their father. He doesn't seem to know quite what to do with them but he has a pile of books that he introduces them to and they all read voraciously. Tytus Broz, seemingly a philanthropic owner of a prosthetic manufactory, isn't through with them. Partly to stanch the threat from him, Eli goies to the local newspaper and meets the woman who he instantly falls in love with, Caitlyn Spies. Eli gets hired on by the newspaper despite his young age and together with Caitlyn they investigate Broz. The ending of the book is tumultuous and thrilling and Eli (and the readers) finally learn what August meant by "Your end is a dead blue wren."

I can't wait to see what the other book club members think of it. I predict some will not like it at all but I give it high marks. show less

Eli, 12 Jahre alt, lebt mit seinem ein Jahr älteren Bruder Gus bei der Mutter und deren Freund, den er wie einen Vater liebt. Die Beiden dealen mit Heroin, währenddessen Slim auf die Jungs aufpasst: ein ehemaliger Häftling, der wegen Mordes nach 30 Jahren vor kurzem aus dem Knast entlassen wurde. Doch trotz dieses nicht gerade kindgerechten Umfeldes ist Elis Leben geprägt von Liebe, Freundschaft und Zuwendung, selbst in den schwierigsten Momenten.

Obwohl die schrecklichsten Dinge geschehen, die selbst in Eli einen Todeswunsch auslösen, findet er immer wieder zurück zu seinem Vertrauen und dem Glauben an das Gute im Leben und im Menschen. Dabei helfen ihm nicht nur seine Familie und Freunde, sondern auch seine Phantasie, die ihn show more selbst in den übelsten Momenten nicht verlässt.

Eli ist der Ich-Erzähler dieser rund 550 Seiten und als Lesende begleiten wir ihn bis zu seinem 18. Lebensjahr. Er ist der geborene Geschichtenerzähler und hat einen Blick für die kleinsten Details:

Wahres Wissen besteht aus Einzelheiten, sagt Slim. Und Wissen ist Macht.
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Einigen mag dies zu ausufernd sein, doch Eli erzählt witzig und durchaus selbstironisch, wobei es für einen 12-, 13jährigen manchmal aber etwas sehr erwachsen klingt. Bedenkt man jedoch, unter welchen Umständen er lebt, mag es nicht weiter verwundern

Dad lächelt und nickt. Nächtliche Panikattacken. Suizidal-depressive Phasen. Dreitägiges Komasaufen. Von Fäusten aufgerissene Augenbrauen. Gallige Kotze. Dünnschiss. Braune Pisse. Das ist unsere Wirklichkeit.
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Einerseits ist es ein hartes, brutales Buch, in dem auch Kinder nicht von Gewalt verschont werden (wie auch, wenn sie in einem solchen Milieu aufwachsen); andererseits spürt man auf beinahe jeder Seite, mit wieviel Wärme und Zuneigung sich die Menschen um Eli und seinen Bruder kümmern (wollen), um ihnen ein besseres Leben und die Verwirklichung ihrer Träume zu ermöglichen.

Für den Autor Trent Dalton ist Eli eine Art alter Ego, denn auch er ist unter solchen Umständen aufgewachsen und sein bester Freund war zeitweise tatsächlich Slim, der Ausbrecherkönig. Durch Daltons beeindruckenden Schreibstil war ich fast das ganze Buch hindurch fest überzeugt, dass ihm all die schlimmen Dinge ebenso zugestoßen sind und machte mich auf die Suche, u.a. nach Zeigefingern show less

If I had to choose only one word to describe this book, I think I would pick “stunning,” which in fact I have seen other reviewers of this book use. However, I believe the protagonist, Eli, who usually tries to pick three words to describe things, would also grant me three, so perhaps I would say “Author Encapsulates Universe.”

The novel - which, I discovered after reading it, turns out to be semi-autobiographical, begins in the 1980’s in Brisbane, Australia. In an interview, author Dalton and his mom agreed that the book was a “50-50 mix of fact and fantasy.”

Eli Bell - the narrator - is aged 12 when we first meet him. Along with his older brother August (a mash-up of Dalton’s three brothers) he lives with his mother and show more stepfather, both of whom are much beloved by the boys, in Darra, a run-down impoverished Brisbane suburb comprised of Polish and Vietnamese refugees. As Eli describes it, in one of the many sublime and illuminating flights of prose in this book:

“Darra is a dream, a stench, a spilt garbage bin, a cracked mirror, a paradise, a bowl of Vietnamese noodle soup filled with prawns, domes of plastic crab meat, pig ears and pig knuckles and pig belly. Darra is a girl washed down a drainpipe, a boy with snot slipping from his nose so ripe it glows on Easter night, a teenage girl stretched across a train track waiting for the express to Central and beyond, a South African man smoking Sudanese weed, a Filipino man injecting Afghani dope next door to a girl from Cambodia sipping milk from Queensland’s Darling Downs. Darra is my quiet sigh, my reflection on war, my dumb pre-teen longing, my home.”

The story opens with a memory taken from the author’s own life depicting a scene between Eli and a family friend, Arthur ‘Slim’ Halliday, a man once dubbed the “Houdini of Boggo Road Gaol” for his extraordinary ability to escape from the notorious and “inescapable” Brisbane prison. Slim met Eli’s stepdad Lyle while on work release, and after prison, ended up doing odd jobs for the family and watching over the boys when their parents were away. (In the book, at any rate, the parents - former addicts who have stopped using drug themselves, now are drug dealers for the lucrative neighborhood business of running Golden Triangle heroin.)

Eli adored Slim, and Slim reciprocated, teaching Eli about life as he learned it in prison: the importance of noticing details; all that you can learn from your other senses besides your ears; and the observation that all people have both good and bad inside. Slim told Eli:

“The tricky part is learnin’ how to be good all the time and bad none of the time. Some of us get that right. Most of us don’t.”

Eli is obsessed with this question. He thinks often of the seminal moment in Star Wars when Luke Skywalker enters Yoda’s cave at Dagobah, and finds out about the potential for darkness within him. Which will Eli turn out to be: a good man, or a bad man? And which one can describe the men in his life? (He gets into a bit of trouble by asking them all.)

In light of Eli’s fixation on this point, Slim tells him further:

“. . . about the good and the bad… I should have told you . . . it’s nothing but a choice. There’s no past in it, there’s no mums and dads and no where you came froms. It’s just a choice. Good. Bad. That’s all there is.”

Eli in fact sees plenty of both good and bad in action, because of the presence of drugs and violent drug dealers in his life. He also observes, however, how choices made at an earlier point can curtail change further up the road. He is focused on how to avoid creating dead ends like that. He knows that he must take steps to ensure he is heading on the right path for his future before getting swallowed up by the universe, as he thinks happened to his parents.

Slim suggests to him: “Stop tellin everybody else’s story and start tellin’ your own for once. Do your time, before it does you.”

By the point when Eli is 18, which is when the story concludes, he has learned - just as Slim told him, that fate can be changed, and other people's stories don't have to be his. Further, he discovers that love and belief in goodness can sustain you through the worst of times, helping you to make the right choices, instead of just the easy ones.

Evaluation: This is a sprawling panorama of life amidst a world, as Dalton says in an interview, “swirling with a hundred social issues – alcoholism, unemployment, domestic violence, generational social curses....” It is fresh, insightful, full of razor-sharp observations and astoundingly infused with optimism. Eli is an earnest and endearing boy who desperately aspires to goodness, in spite of all the cruelty around him, and the misfortunes to which he and his family were subjected.

Some of the scenes depicted are not for the faint-hearted, but I was awe-struck. show less

I got lucky on this one. I got it for free in an Independent Bookstore Day promotion, but having read a couple of interesting reviews of it, I gave it a shot. It took me a while to get grabbed by it (maybe as much as 200 pages), but then that familiar feeling of a being caught in a good story took over.

The central character is Eli Bell, a young teenager growing up in Darra, a small Australian town. His mom and dad have split up, and he lives with his mom, her boyfriend Lyle, his older brother August, and their “babysitter” and Eli’s mentor, Slim. Sounds like a relatively normal family setting, but . . . Eli’s mom and boyfriend are heroin addicts and dealers. August is an enigmatic, wise soul who has chosen not to speak (he does show more write enigmatically prophetic messages with his finger tracing letters in the air). And Slim is an ex-con, a convicted killer and renowned prison escape artist.

And then there’s Caitlyn. I won’t say anything about Caitlyn, because saying almost anything about Caitlyn would be a spoiler.

In some ways, the story manages to come out of all that as a recognizable coming-of-age story. And I even thought of Huck Finn at times as I read it (although it’s like Huck Finn in Australia in the age of drugs and corruption in high places). Eli is learning his life lessons. He’s living with a fundamental question about good and bad. As Slim tells him, “It’s just a choice. Good. Bad. That’s all there is.” And Eli wonders how you make that choice, why bad people “decided to be bad instead of good.” He has enough bad people around him for full time study.

Obviously Eli faces some special challenges. Through no choices of his own, he is hip deep in a swamp of organized crime, drugs, and murder. Somehow, arching over it all is his ambition to become a crime reporter and to choose Good.

It comes together. Eli is tested, and everything is at stake — the chance to choose Good, the chance to become a crime reporter, the chance to straighten out the lives of the people around him, and there’s Caitlyn in there again.

There are magical elements as well. August is truly prophetic . . . somehow. And there is a mysterious red phone in a hidden room in the house Eli is growing up in that rings and intervenes at strategic moments.

Your reading of the story, if you are at all like me, will change dramatically once you realize (in Trent Dalton’s comments about the book in a kind of afterword) that the story has its roots in fact. Dalton says, “This book draws heavily from the most profound period of my childhood, when I was raised by a pair of dangerously successful heroin dealers.” So this is not just a wild fiction. Some of it is true. Even Slim is based on the real life Slim Halliday, “The Houdini of Boggo Road” and family friend of Dalton when he was growing up.

The story is so personal that I’m a little afraid that it may be THE book that Dalton has in him. He’s a very good writer, though, and I hope there’s more. show less

This is a beautifully written book, which was essential for this to be an enjoyable read. Why? It's big. It feels like it's bigger than it needs to be. Even though there's always plenty happening, the core plot progresses slowly. It does snowball gradually, but there are a lot of digressions. It all adds up to the overall story but if the writing hadn't been so good, it would have been excessive.
I did enjoy this. I do think, however, that you need to be Australian to really get a lot of the content. It's always good to get an authentic Australian story, but overseas readers won't understand a lot of references.

Oh my. I loved this book. It's a thriller, a romance, a family drama, a crime story, a fantasy, a gritty coming of age story. It's about human complexity and contradiction. Revenge and redemption. Time and chance.

I admit that I connected with it on an intimate level having grown up a bit too soon in my own life. I know what it's like to be 12 and faced with adult responsibilities and choices. I understand the dichotomy of being young, confused, and fearful yet needing to be strong, informed, and capable for survival.

Despite an inauspicious start in life, Eli Bell (and I) actually had the most important ingredient for a future... Unconditional love and support.

More than anything, Boy Swallows Universe is a love story. It's a story show more about the limitless possibilities of love and the unconditional nature of real love which we can find in the coldest, darkest, and strangest places. show less