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The Beat
Friday night in a city park and a young man is found battered to death in a public toilet. The motive appears obvious: the place is a well-known gay haunt and a common target for local thugs. But this is not the simple case of queerbashing that it seems. Six strangers hold the answer; they alone know what really happened that evening - when the intended victims suddenly struck back.
143 pages, Paperback
First published April 1, 1985
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March 15, 2019
The Beat is composed of five chapters book-ended by the retellings of a violent incident taking place in a cottage (a cruisy toilet in a park, not a cute little house) in Melbourne. Those five chapters each focus on one of the persons present during that incident.
The aim at first seems to be to explore the aftermath of the incident, how people, during the week following the event, cope with having been part of it. This could have been quite an interesting book. However, Payne slowly seems to lose his focus and each new chapter deals a little less with the attack until, by the last one, it is barely mentioned. The book thus becomes a collection of sketchy, impressionistic portraits, which are too incomplete to make the characters that interesting. And they are not particularly likeable either.
The saving grace of The Beat is its writing. The language has an energy that takes you along with it and leads you on. It's not the best of book but it's most definitely not the worst either. And it shows that things haven't changed that much in the lives of gay men since the mid 1980s (though the gender politics would probably be less clumsily expressed).
The aim at first seems to be to explore the aftermath of the incident, how people, during the week following the event, cope with having been part of it. This could have been quite an interesting book. However, Payne slowly seems to lose his focus and each new chapter deals a little less with the attack until, by the last one, it is barely mentioned. The book thus becomes a collection of sketchy, impressionistic portraits, which are too incomplete to make the characters that interesting. And they are not particularly likeable either.
The saving grace of The Beat is its writing. The language has an energy that takes you along with it and leads you on. It's not the best of book but it's most definitely not the worst either. And it shows that things haven't changed that much in the lives of gay men since the mid 1980s (though the gender politics would probably be less clumsily expressed).
Displaying 1 of 1 review