My Brother Jack

While the weighted, staccato syllables of its title evoke the worst kind of sentimental Australian literature, My Brother Jack is—for the most part at least—anything but.

The novel begins with a lengthy evocation of suburban, working-class Melbourne in the years immediately after the first World War. David Meredith grows up in a house of death: his mother welcomes a number of injured veterans to convalesce in their front room, exposing an impressionable David to the grim realities of mortality. His father is a tyrannical abuser who whips the brothers on a weekly basis and discourages them from anything other than contributing to the household economy.

At this point, Jack is three years older, and his rambunctious self already appears show more fully formed. As David is drawn into a lifelong habit of melancholy and inhibition, the hedonistic Jack chides him for his sexual diffidence and bookishness. His virility is shameful and almost overpowering to David, and its not until he moves out of the family home and into his first marriage that he is able to gain some perspective on his own life. David is praised for his work as a journalist and writer (side note: David is able to buy a beautiful home and a brand new MG solely on an early-career journalist's salary—how things have changed), and is gradually welcomed into a more rarified enclave of intellectuals and an educated elite. Watching the relationship between David and Jack evolve is convincing and a genuine pleasure.

Though it is justly praised as a great Australian novel, you couldn't wear that particular crown without suffering from a number of the flaws implied by it. At times, the novel reads like a number of episodes strung together without enough coherence. To give one example, the characterisation of Helen, David's first wife, is deliberately inconsistent: she is portrayed as a sexually potent and ideologically militant young woman whose edges are bevelled by the banalities of suburban life. Nothing so strange in that, but Johnston's narrator fails to acknowledge this transition, or give much account to it at all, to the extent that she seems like two different characters entirely, rather than one struggling with her own internal contradictions.

Likewise, as an acutely self-conscious narrator, there are aspects of the David's experiences that are inconspicuously left unaddressed. As one astute reviewer on here has observed, David's growing distance from Australian culture as he becomes embroiled in a more wordly, cosmopolitan life, is not addressed in as meaningful a way as you'd expect.

What I liked most about My Brother Jack was its vigorous and unselfconscious use of the Australian idiom. Often, this kind of thing makes me cringe, especially when it comes from a university educated writer who would never in a million years use the word "struth" in earnest. But Johnston manages to navigate the linguistic tensions between a more elevated King's English and your classic post-convict Aussie slang. Johnston never places himself above Jack's manner of speech, and invests him with so much humour and vitality that its clear there's something in the Australian larrikin archetype he finds enduring.

The shifting relationship between David and Jack is handled deftly, and I do wish the second volume in this series was held in higher esteem, because I do want to see where it goes, but not enough to want to read the next one. show less

The story begins at the closing of World War I and ends at the culmination of World War II. The years in between furnish the backdrop against which two Australian working-class brothers grow into adolescence, young manhood, and the early years of maturity that are marked by marriage, children, and ageing parents. Though masterfully drawn as authentic Australian characters in an authentic Australian landscape, Dave, Jack, their parents, and their wives are true to archetypes that exist in every human culture.
After a childhood of games, fights, and mischief, Jack wholeheartedly romps through his hormonally driven skirt-chasing phase, then leaps into adulthood, brashly taking on the mantle of manhood, which means patriotic service to his show more country, responsibility to his family, and creation of the next generation of human beings. Jack is Everyman.
Dave occupies a sort of middle-management fringe that nature can afford because Jack is tending his never-ending job so well. Dave is pushed from behind by civilization's need for progress and pulled forward by Jack, who needs him to be better than he is. Each of them is driven by eternal forces, Jack the man of action and Dave the man whose decisions are almost always non-decisions that move him inexorably forward without feeling responsibility for where he's been or where he's going.
The tale is told in the first person by Dave, with such incredible self-scrutiny and painful insight into the foibles and weaknesses of a clever, gifted writer that the reader feels compelled to accept it as a true autobiography. But it most likely isn't, at least not in its entirety. The gift of a novel is that the writer can tell the entire, bald truth and hide behind the fiction of it. A secondary benefit that feeds the novelist's creative soul is that events can be changed that didn't turn out right in real life or maybe seemed too mundane to be worthy of printed expression. Life is stranger than fiction, and fiction is more honest.
Johnston is a superb writer, and My Brother Jack is on my Top Ten List of Things That Make Me Glad I Trekked to Australia—right up there with the magpie's morning song, the stark white bark of giant gum trees, fine red-orange sand, the haunting sound of the didjeridoo, and the aura of people who have been here so long that they are inseparable from the earth.
On the back cover of my fragile, yellowing 1971 paperback copy is an excerpt from a review published in the London Illustrated News in which the reviewer concludes, "I truly believe this to be one of the greatest books written this century." Well said. show less

Put this one on your must read Classics list.
This book is really a memoir of the author (David Meredith) who just happens to admire his older brother Jack as he is the total opposite of himself. It takes place in Melbourne Australia between the 2 wars. It starts with his parents returning from the 1st World War, when the 2 boys are very young. It gives us a fantastic insight into the impact the War had on peoples lives and how they dealt with it, and how Australian society developed from it, through the roaring twenties and the Depression and into the 2nd World War. Jack is the quintiseential Aussie like his parents and their cohorts while David is quiet, reserved and out of place in that working-class suburban Melbourne world. Yet it show more is David that grows up to fill a space in society far greater than most people can imagine for themselves while Jack, the lively one, the adaptable one, the one in tune with his environment, never grows out of that environment.

The greatness of this book is its sheer honesty, and the honesty of the author. It portrays an Australian society that is violent, racist and sexist to levels that are embarrassing to admit today. It shows how characters react to what is happening around them and from these pieces build their lives. In this environment characters can be both kind and caring and at the same time rough and self-centred. Jack seems to blend all these elements into a rather balanced personality, but David admits early in the book, he is not a nice person - by the end of the book you have to agree with him.

My Brother Jack is the first of a trilogy which basically is a memoir of the author's life. The other books are Clean Straw for Nothing, and, A Cartload of Clay. show less

I've just re-read this book 50 years after studying it at school. Interestingly, the book remains compelling and has stood the test of time.
It is a harsh and raw self examination of the writers life. While many details are known to be factually inaccurate, the whole gives an impression of what life was like in Melbourne after WW1, and how Johnston lived his life. No picnic, it is still a great piece of writing.

Interesting. I'm glad I've read it, but I certainly have no desire to keep a copy on my shelves and re-read it later. Almost always described as an Australian Classic - it is unambiguously Australian, but I'm not sure what makes it a "classic"? I don't know enough literary history to place it in the context of other Australian books, but I'm guessing that it was among the earlier books to be unashamedly about the real lives of people who identify themselves as "Australian", and I suppose it was our involvement in the World Wars which was so important in shaping that identity. As such, I found it worthwhile to look back on what sort of society my parents and grandparents grew up in and how that might have made them into the people they show more were, and hence made me. My own personal family history is strongly linked to characters from this period and so it's good to get a different view on that part of our history. I found myself identifying quite closely with the narrator David, but the character of his brother Jack remains a complete mystery to me. I think maybe that's the point of the story?....to challenge the "Jack"s in our society?? Hmmmm...I think I'm out of my depth here, not being the analytical, intellectual type. show less

I read this book years ago and some of the imagery remains with me. Especially the part when as a young boy he thought all adult males were meant to have a limb missing. This was because all the men he knew had returned injured from the war.
This is a great Australian novel.

My Brother Jack is an Australian family saga covering the period between the ends of WW1 and WW2. Only a short time after its publication in the early 60s, the novel was already hailed as an Australian classic.

It is without doubt a beautifully drawn portrait of life in Melbourne in the inter-war years: the maimed, limbless soldiers returning from the trenches in France; the daily life on the dockside and at a print works; the effects of the Depression; schooling and religion. With Australian writers with the skill of Johnston, Patrick White and Ruth Park, there can be no better understood era in any country at any time.

Jack is the brother of the narrator, David Meredith, who fulfils an early ambition to become a writer. Jack himself show more is a model of how Australian males of the era liked to see themselves: a bit of a larrikin, bold, energetic, rebellious, good with his fists, a game adventurer. As with many other Australians, Jack’s adventurous spirit is thwarted. Johnston alludes to the pioneering spirit like that of the Old West in the US, only the Australian interior offered nothing to conquer but barren desert.

The narrator himself, while the weaker and more studious of the brothers, is the one who ultimately achieves greater worldly success. But as time goes on, David’s more intellectual, cosmopolitan outlook alienates him from his Australian roots. I found this aspect the least well charted development in the story. For most of the first half of the novel, the narrator’s eye is sharply focused on the people around him, not on David himself. So the reader feels less comfortable with the sudden 180 degree shift of focus onto the narrator as a character in his own story, as he begins to discover dissatisfaction with his marriage and ordinary middle class life in Melbourne.

All the same a very absorbing and rewarding book. show less