What do you think?
Rate this book
The Mary Smokes Boys: A Novel
Grey's mother dies giving birth to his sister Irene and he prays that she will be returned to him so he might protect her from the world as his father did not. This prayer, Grey believes, is answered in his sister Irene. He becomes obsessed with protecting her purity and innocence while befriending the wild boys of the small town of Mary Smokes -- horse-handlers and fox hunters and part-time timber workers -- members of a small, vanishing tribe who find themselves caught between an old relationship with place and a new one that is exemplified by the highway that threatens their town. Holland's kinship with Per Petterson's "Out Stealing Horses" is palpable. "The Mary Smokes Boys" is heart-rending and unforgettable, a suspenseful story of horse thieves and broken promises, of love and tragedy, of the fragility and grace of small town life, and how one fateful moment can forever alter the course of a life.
223 pages, Paperback
First published August 1, 2010
7 people are currently reading
168 people want to read
About the author
Patrick Holland
21 books43 followersPatrick Holland grew up in outback Queensland, Australia. He worked as a stockman until taking up literary studies at Griffith University. He has studied Chinese and Vietnamese at universities in Beijing, Qingdao and Saigon.
His work attempts a strict minimalism inspired by Arvo Pärt and takes up geographical and theological themes, focussing on life’s simplest elements: light and dark; noise, sound and silence; wind and water.
His work attempts a strict minimalism inspired by Arvo Pärt and takes up geographical and theological themes, focussing on life’s simplest elements: light and dark; noise, sound and silence; wind and water.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 28 of 28 reviews
June 1, 2024
The description of Holland's forthcoming novel Oblivion suggests that it expands on Holland's preoccupation with the impact of modernity on place. In spare prose where not a word or a scene is superfluous, The Mary Smokes Boys is set in a small town in the Brisbane Valley, not far from the city in terms of distance but at risk from either encroachment or a bypass. Encroachment would bring the banality of supermarkets, chain stores, fast food outlets and project home developments, while a bypass would consign the town to a slow death through the decline of passing trade. But Holland doesn't romanticise the town. The surrounding vista of bush, mountains and creek is evoked in exquisite prose but the town itself is a place of limited choices. For the young people whose story Holland tells, it is a place of irrelevant education, limited entertainment, and few employment opportunities. Most young people leave for the city and they don't come back. The ones that stay get into trouble in the fringe economy: horse theft, gambling, and prostitution.
And for children living in poverty or with feckless parents, welfare support is non-existent.
When 10-year-old Grey's mother dies giving birth to his sister Irene, his grandmother moves in to care for the infant, but the love the girl receives comes from Grey. His father Bill North is a useless drunk, and the grandmother is a sour and judgemental woman who disapproved of her daughter-in-law's religion and this second pregnancy. She also disapproves of the local lads and their propensity for ending up in juvenile detention. But though Grey is a quiet and sensitive boy, haunted by the loss of his mother and devoted to his scrawny little sister, he soon becomes one of the Mary Smokes' Boys. And when he leaves school, he drifts into the same kind of odd jobs on farms or a few hours doing the night shift at the service station.
It's hard to convey the sense of anguish that this story evokes. Trevor Shearston's Hare's Fur (2019, see my review) made my heart ache for the children hiding out in a cave after their feckless parent was sent to gaol for drug dealing. Like those children, all that Grey and Irene have is each other, and the existential threat that haunts the novel is their fear of being separated. Grey's half-hearted girlfriend Vanessa isn't interested in a loser stuck in a dead-end town, and he knows he could have a better life in the city. But he can't leave Irene behind, and he can't take her with him, even though in the town it is he who has effective custody of her after his grandmother dies and his father starts working far afield and comes home only intermittently. And nobody intervenes.
To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2024/06/02/t...
And for children living in poverty or with feckless parents, welfare support is non-existent.
When 10-year-old Grey's mother dies giving birth to his sister Irene, his grandmother moves in to care for the infant, but the love the girl receives comes from Grey. His father Bill North is a useless drunk, and the grandmother is a sour and judgemental woman who disapproved of her daughter-in-law's religion and this second pregnancy. She also disapproves of the local lads and their propensity for ending up in juvenile detention. But though Grey is a quiet and sensitive boy, haunted by the loss of his mother and devoted to his scrawny little sister, he soon becomes one of the Mary Smokes' Boys. And when he leaves school, he drifts into the same kind of odd jobs on farms or a few hours doing the night shift at the service station.
It's hard to convey the sense of anguish that this story evokes. Trevor Shearston's Hare's Fur (2019, see my review) made my heart ache for the children hiding out in a cave after their feckless parent was sent to gaol for drug dealing. Like those children, all that Grey and Irene have is each other, and the existential threat that haunts the novel is their fear of being separated. Grey's half-hearted girlfriend Vanessa isn't interested in a loser stuck in a dead-end town, and he knows he could have a better life in the city. But he can't leave Irene behind, and he can't take her with him, even though in the town it is he who has effective custody of her after his grandmother dies and his father starts working far afield and comes home only intermittently. And nobody intervenes.
To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2024/06/02/t...
July 23, 2013
While we are at an inextinguishably critical juncture in which the function of reviewing contemporary literature demands a sincere reassessment within the aperture of the global media — do we readers succumb to engaging in a measured and industrious critique for the underlying purpose of endorsement, of publishing promotions, of exclusively contributing to the generation of future book sales, without an oblique investment in actually framing the literature in the context of its substance? — one must always be wary of the motivations of journalistic hyperbole. This is an arduous task for a reviewer to perform with any degree of insightful consistency, of self-reflexive discernment, but it’s especially the case in the context of reading a great book.
Patrick Holland’s The Mary Smokes Boys is one of these. In fact, it was easily one of my three favourite books of 2010 (the others were Jack Kerouac’s Big Sur and Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom), and like those two triumphs of modern American fiction, Holland’s novel is a lyric testament to the power of a single writer capturing the world through the eye of his quill. Even in this age in which, at every fleeting moment, the economically-governed “progress” of global technology and commercial industry consumes an individual’s means to hypostatise the present — to capture an irrefutable vision of the place we hold in our millennial world with fire and eloquence and valour and violent intelligence before such a perspective is occluded entirely from view. Patrick Holland has proven himself robustly attuned to this task, and his second novel, The Mary Smokes Boys, swarms with the value of integrity and sensation in a way that works of fiction so rarely do, in our daily margins of profit and financial gain.
I can promise you that this will be the most significant new work of novel-length Australian fiction you will read from 2010 (I will not disparage nor diminish the vitality of other great and powerful works of original fiction published in the same year; and from Alex Miller to Chris Womersley to Jon Bauer to Wayne Macauley to Emmett Stinson to Joel Deane to Daniel Ducrou to James Laidler ad infinitum, I know there are many), but Patrick Holland’s The Mary Smokes Boys vibrates beyond the realm of nepotistically-inclined marketplace comparisons, because the novel offers a reality so achingly wrought, so decisively rendered, so incendiary in its heartbroken hunt for human morality that the book, and its relevance, could only be tarnished by the limitations of analogy. So what about Holland’s narrative is so relevant to you or I?
First among many reasons is that he has crafted a story to chill the bones, one in which the haunting bildungsroman of Grey North — sole son to an emotionally-insensitive self-penitent Australian stockman given to vice, and an inexperienced but soulfully generous Gaelic mother devoted to Christianity whom we only come to know through retrospect — is transcribed to page with a trembling fidelity of purpose, and with an urgency and economy of phrase which intensifies the iconographic culture of Mary Smokes, foregrounds its symbolic heft as an almost apocryphal town to which all modern Australia has either originated from or retreated to: the locus of the heartland of our country.
Second among my rationale is that a story of these same dimensions, of a sharp-eyed boy growing up within a forsaken community to endure and transcend the emotional compromises of adolescence — which is to say, a premise almost originary in its vivid overuse within the context of Western literary fiction as to now be a mythology of our culture, a cipher of the way in which we look to writing to self-identify — supplants all prior constructs in the veracity of its articulation. Holland elevates the genre by exploiting the silences manifest within this project of adolescent growth: for example, Grey feels such an obligation of love for his younger sister, Irene, with such an unquestioned sacralising kinship as to channel an almost possessive pathology, as if Grey’s nondistinct (but always apparent) wounded reckoning to protect Irene was beyond the role of territorial older sibling and dancing on the cusp of desire (but this is of course the very point, for to bear human witness to something so beautiful is also to simultaneously engage in the conviction to attain that which is desired).
This isn’t a philosophical, psychological or psychosocial desire, either, but a physiological one; an embodied paean, engendered in a man’s breath and heart, to intervene on the behalf of that object of beauty, so that nothing can intrude to damage it. Irene is Grey North’s touchstone for the person he strives to become: a dependable protector, unlike his alcohol-crippled old man, an independent scholar of experience, like his best friend Ook, a wayfarer to the land of those same wild-prairie Queensland horse districts in which Holland himself enjoyed a boyhood, immersed for twenty-odd years in the music of a bluff of silent tussock, of a solitary fox padding away from the corona of the town’s menacing shadow, of the rumbustious meander of Mary Smokes Creek.
I could will myself here, as a discriminating reader, to broker a précis of the plot for Patrick Holland’s brilliant book — a small rural town, persecuted by bankruptcy, and simultaneously haunted by both the threat and deliverance of a new council-auspiced highway which will disrupt the sleepy isolation of Mary Smokes forever; the emergence of a love triangle which must by the consequence of its geometry only signify horrifying consequences for Grey, his blood brother, Ook, and his sister Irene; a rash attempt on Grey’s father’s behalf to salvage a family he himself unintentionally dismantled; a youthful ache to reconcile the difference in racial and political experience felt by oneself and one’s friends, to spurn the ubiquitous scorn of conservative values in the Abaddon-like outpost that is Mary Smokes; the fragility of something, a place, a heritage, a people, a melody, a life more precious than all others, being beset upon by those who, from their own dimensions of heartbreak, are already sickened by loss; a world weakened by one’s familiarity with it, until what originally made it spectacular has become a normativity, so that its votive of flame ends up guttering — but such attempts would only reduce the complexity of Holland’s emotional landscape to a thumbnail impression.
It’s best to leave it to the following letter, which I wrote to Holland, myself, upon reading his novel, to express the fullness of my gratitude. This is not just a novel of breathtaking vision, but one which displays a humbling respect for his readers. He invites you into the folds of a personal memory, and asks that you respond in kind.
Patrick,
I’ve just finished reading The Mary Smokes Boys — literally ten minutes ago, and it just galvanised the tinder of my gut and heart and wrought me asunder: it is such a profound and powerful little novel, so towering with empathy and human compassion, for an authentic, undeviating, unprepossessed and always sincere affection & concern for your characters, and it bristles with pain; the pain we witness exchanged between Grey, Ook, Irene, Vanessa and the unfurnished desolation of what has coalesced over time and through a chasm of misdirected intention into the interior desolation of Bill North, and the exile & fidelity of the wild boys. But it also rings with a yawning, bloodbuzzed, free-throttle authorial pain which I can only discriminate, with the innermost transparency, to the sacrifice you had to make to write that lucid, staggering, awful, incendiary, most honest, vast and fire-breaking ending. I could never allow myself to channel that much hurt, for an ending like yours; it is testament to your certainty in the love for the people who populate this world that you dare to render such heartbreak, and stir the lost, wheeling embers inside the most fierce reader. I think this is actually an artefact of immense creation, Patrick, a vivid and living book, and that aching penultimate-chapter sacrifice feels corrosive in the best way; like you’ve crafted a subversive Australian pastoral tragedy which earns both its grief and its wonder. I wouldn’t gnaw the inside of your cheek or give a prophetic fuck about any quivering, feeble criticism dispatched your way: you’ve written something I think amounts to one of the best works of fiction this year, and you can only be accused of defying comfort: you are a mad one, Patrick, a real furious exponent of the word, an important scribe and a heartfelt moralist. I’m fortunate to know you, and share in the passion you transfer to page. As for the convergence of ideological & theological expression in the novel, from the glimmer of reincarnation (both literal/embodied and allegorical); the skeptical urgency, yearning for and reluctant dispassion with religious faith; the four-antlered eros/phileo/agape/storge love felt, fundamental obsession and distorted loyalty between Grey and Irene deepening the conflict apparent in the themes of possessing that which is immediately lost; the seeming vacuity of domestic space; the racial condescension intentionally represented towards the likes of Ook and Pos; the violence of wanting something, perhaps sacred, so much that it seeds ruination — I’m sure this all culminated to will unsympathetic fools into convulsions of critical wariness. But such feelings are cruel, lacking in foundation and blind to beauty. If you’ve frustrated anyone, you’ve moved them. That’s how I’d choose to view it. But it would be compromising and counter-intuitive to take anything expressed in this vein in the unsweetened guise of truth. Your book is more than any of this. It is a song, and they have discerned more rousing pastimes than to hear it. This is their inefficiency; not yours, and certainly not that of The Mary Smokes Boys.
Sincerely,
Kirk Marshall
Patrick Holland’s The Mary Smokes Boys is one of these. In fact, it was easily one of my three favourite books of 2010 (the others were Jack Kerouac’s Big Sur and Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom), and like those two triumphs of modern American fiction, Holland’s novel is a lyric testament to the power of a single writer capturing the world through the eye of his quill. Even in this age in which, at every fleeting moment, the economically-governed “progress” of global technology and commercial industry consumes an individual’s means to hypostatise the present — to capture an irrefutable vision of the place we hold in our millennial world with fire and eloquence and valour and violent intelligence before such a perspective is occluded entirely from view. Patrick Holland has proven himself robustly attuned to this task, and his second novel, The Mary Smokes Boys, swarms with the value of integrity and sensation in a way that works of fiction so rarely do, in our daily margins of profit and financial gain.
I can promise you that this will be the most significant new work of novel-length Australian fiction you will read from 2010 (I will not disparage nor diminish the vitality of other great and powerful works of original fiction published in the same year; and from Alex Miller to Chris Womersley to Jon Bauer to Wayne Macauley to Emmett Stinson to Joel Deane to Daniel Ducrou to James Laidler ad infinitum, I know there are many), but Patrick Holland’s The Mary Smokes Boys vibrates beyond the realm of nepotistically-inclined marketplace comparisons, because the novel offers a reality so achingly wrought, so decisively rendered, so incendiary in its heartbroken hunt for human morality that the book, and its relevance, could only be tarnished by the limitations of analogy. So what about Holland’s narrative is so relevant to you or I?
First among many reasons is that he has crafted a story to chill the bones, one in which the haunting bildungsroman of Grey North — sole son to an emotionally-insensitive self-penitent Australian stockman given to vice, and an inexperienced but soulfully generous Gaelic mother devoted to Christianity whom we only come to know through retrospect — is transcribed to page with a trembling fidelity of purpose, and with an urgency and economy of phrase which intensifies the iconographic culture of Mary Smokes, foregrounds its symbolic heft as an almost apocryphal town to which all modern Australia has either originated from or retreated to: the locus of the heartland of our country.
Second among my rationale is that a story of these same dimensions, of a sharp-eyed boy growing up within a forsaken community to endure and transcend the emotional compromises of adolescence — which is to say, a premise almost originary in its vivid overuse within the context of Western literary fiction as to now be a mythology of our culture, a cipher of the way in which we look to writing to self-identify — supplants all prior constructs in the veracity of its articulation. Holland elevates the genre by exploiting the silences manifest within this project of adolescent growth: for example, Grey feels such an obligation of love for his younger sister, Irene, with such an unquestioned sacralising kinship as to channel an almost possessive pathology, as if Grey’s nondistinct (but always apparent) wounded reckoning to protect Irene was beyond the role of territorial older sibling and dancing on the cusp of desire (but this is of course the very point, for to bear human witness to something so beautiful is also to simultaneously engage in the conviction to attain that which is desired).
This isn’t a philosophical, psychological or psychosocial desire, either, but a physiological one; an embodied paean, engendered in a man’s breath and heart, to intervene on the behalf of that object of beauty, so that nothing can intrude to damage it. Irene is Grey North’s touchstone for the person he strives to become: a dependable protector, unlike his alcohol-crippled old man, an independent scholar of experience, like his best friend Ook, a wayfarer to the land of those same wild-prairie Queensland horse districts in which Holland himself enjoyed a boyhood, immersed for twenty-odd years in the music of a bluff of silent tussock, of a solitary fox padding away from the corona of the town’s menacing shadow, of the rumbustious meander of Mary Smokes Creek.
I could will myself here, as a discriminating reader, to broker a précis of the plot for Patrick Holland’s brilliant book — a small rural town, persecuted by bankruptcy, and simultaneously haunted by both the threat and deliverance of a new council-auspiced highway which will disrupt the sleepy isolation of Mary Smokes forever; the emergence of a love triangle which must by the consequence of its geometry only signify horrifying consequences for Grey, his blood brother, Ook, and his sister Irene; a rash attempt on Grey’s father’s behalf to salvage a family he himself unintentionally dismantled; a youthful ache to reconcile the difference in racial and political experience felt by oneself and one’s friends, to spurn the ubiquitous scorn of conservative values in the Abaddon-like outpost that is Mary Smokes; the fragility of something, a place, a heritage, a people, a melody, a life more precious than all others, being beset upon by those who, from their own dimensions of heartbreak, are already sickened by loss; a world weakened by one’s familiarity with it, until what originally made it spectacular has become a normativity, so that its votive of flame ends up guttering — but such attempts would only reduce the complexity of Holland’s emotional landscape to a thumbnail impression.
It’s best to leave it to the following letter, which I wrote to Holland, myself, upon reading his novel, to express the fullness of my gratitude. This is not just a novel of breathtaking vision, but one which displays a humbling respect for his readers. He invites you into the folds of a personal memory, and asks that you respond in kind.
Patrick,
I’ve just finished reading The Mary Smokes Boys — literally ten minutes ago, and it just galvanised the tinder of my gut and heart and wrought me asunder: it is such a profound and powerful little novel, so towering with empathy and human compassion, for an authentic, undeviating, unprepossessed and always sincere affection & concern for your characters, and it bristles with pain; the pain we witness exchanged between Grey, Ook, Irene, Vanessa and the unfurnished desolation of what has coalesced over time and through a chasm of misdirected intention into the interior desolation of Bill North, and the exile & fidelity of the wild boys. But it also rings with a yawning, bloodbuzzed, free-throttle authorial pain which I can only discriminate, with the innermost transparency, to the sacrifice you had to make to write that lucid, staggering, awful, incendiary, most honest, vast and fire-breaking ending. I could never allow myself to channel that much hurt, for an ending like yours; it is testament to your certainty in the love for the people who populate this world that you dare to render such heartbreak, and stir the lost, wheeling embers inside the most fierce reader. I think this is actually an artefact of immense creation, Patrick, a vivid and living book, and that aching penultimate-chapter sacrifice feels corrosive in the best way; like you’ve crafted a subversive Australian pastoral tragedy which earns both its grief and its wonder. I wouldn’t gnaw the inside of your cheek or give a prophetic fuck about any quivering, feeble criticism dispatched your way: you’ve written something I think amounts to one of the best works of fiction this year, and you can only be accused of defying comfort: you are a mad one, Patrick, a real furious exponent of the word, an important scribe and a heartfelt moralist. I’m fortunate to know you, and share in the passion you transfer to page. As for the convergence of ideological & theological expression in the novel, from the glimmer of reincarnation (both literal/embodied and allegorical); the skeptical urgency, yearning for and reluctant dispassion with religious faith; the four-antlered eros/phileo/agape/storge love felt, fundamental obsession and distorted loyalty between Grey and Irene deepening the conflict apparent in the themes of possessing that which is immediately lost; the seeming vacuity of domestic space; the racial condescension intentionally represented towards the likes of Ook and Pos; the violence of wanting something, perhaps sacred, so much that it seeds ruination — I’m sure this all culminated to will unsympathetic fools into convulsions of critical wariness. But such feelings are cruel, lacking in foundation and blind to beauty. If you’ve frustrated anyone, you’ve moved them. That’s how I’d choose to view it. But it would be compromising and counter-intuitive to take anything expressed in this vein in the unsweetened guise of truth. Your book is more than any of this. It is a song, and they have discerned more rousing pastimes than to hear it. This is their inefficiency; not yours, and certainly not that of The Mary Smokes Boys.
Sincerely,
Kirk Marshall
March 16, 2013
Patrick Holland’s second novel, The Mary Smokes Boys, acutely explores the divide between regional and urban Australia. The small town of Mary Smokes, located in the Brisbane Valley, is poised on the brink of extinction. All but its most damaged young people leave as a matter of course – opportunities are scarce, the traps and effects of poverty are everywhere, and the main character, though deeply rooted in this place, repeatedly refers to the city as “the future” and wonders whether life in Mary Smokes is “anomalous to the point of ridiculousness”.
Certainly, it takes a while to really feel that this book is set in the here and now. It opens (in 1985) with the death in childbirth of Grey’s twenty-six-year-old mother, who had been forced to marry after she fell pregnant aged fifteen. The “wild boys” of the district – who Grey will soon join – roam the nearby creek carrying kerosene lamps. In the near-universal absence of their grieving, drunkard father, Grey becomes parent to sister Irene, with no intervention from authorities. This is “wide and empty country in which the world [is] uninterested”.
But this novel is fiercely relevant to contemporary Australia. The dying way of life in Mary Smokes is in constant dialogue with the threat and promise of the expanding city. Grey is torn between the possibility of another life, as represented by his “not quite” romance with Vanessa, an accomplished beauty from a nearby town who studies in Brisbane, and the lure of his home town’s wild places, and his community of outsiders. This struggle between the tamed domesticity of “respectability”, and capitulation to nature or instinct, is at the heart of the novel, along with the idea of inherent (or original) sin. Different varieties of spirituality and faith pulse beneath the surface of the story – the fervent, archaic Catholicism of Irene and her lost mother; the middle-class ‘prosperity Christianity’ of Vanessa’s family; and the almost mystical communion with place shared by Grey, Eccleston and Irene.
The nature writing is no flatly appreciative still-life. The wind, the grasses and the creek are palpably animated and connected. (“Winter’s scant water was the colour of coffee, but the rain that had fallen upstream had turned it clear.”) Holland is an accomplished short-story writer, and this shows in his deft economy with words and images. His structure, too, is impressively spare. Barely a scene or image is wasted – even seemingly inconsequential characters or encounters prove seeds for important plot developments. He weaves Hemingway’s blunt sentences and carved dialogue with the old-fashioned storytelling of a folk tale, imbued with the dark romance of a Nick Cave ballad. (“... all he inherited was broken or delivered stillborn. The one cherished thing bequeathed him by the past was the memory of his mother.”)
The Mary Smokes Boys is a novel of ideas – about Australia’s towns and cities, about our relationship with nature, about the nature of faith – but it’s also a character-driven suspense story, balancing a driving sense of menace with a deep human connection at its heart.
This review was first published by The Age.
Certainly, it takes a while to really feel that this book is set in the here and now. It opens (in 1985) with the death in childbirth of Grey’s twenty-six-year-old mother, who had been forced to marry after she fell pregnant aged fifteen. The “wild boys” of the district – who Grey will soon join – roam the nearby creek carrying kerosene lamps. In the near-universal absence of their grieving, drunkard father, Grey becomes parent to sister Irene, with no intervention from authorities. This is “wide and empty country in which the world [is] uninterested”.
But this novel is fiercely relevant to contemporary Australia. The dying way of life in Mary Smokes is in constant dialogue with the threat and promise of the expanding city. Grey is torn between the possibility of another life, as represented by his “not quite” romance with Vanessa, an accomplished beauty from a nearby town who studies in Brisbane, and the lure of his home town’s wild places, and his community of outsiders. This struggle between the tamed domesticity of “respectability”, and capitulation to nature or instinct, is at the heart of the novel, along with the idea of inherent (or original) sin. Different varieties of spirituality and faith pulse beneath the surface of the story – the fervent, archaic Catholicism of Irene and her lost mother; the middle-class ‘prosperity Christianity’ of Vanessa’s family; and the almost mystical communion with place shared by Grey, Eccleston and Irene.
The nature writing is no flatly appreciative still-life. The wind, the grasses and the creek are palpably animated and connected. (“Winter’s scant water was the colour of coffee, but the rain that had fallen upstream had turned it clear.”) Holland is an accomplished short-story writer, and this shows in his deft economy with words and images. His structure, too, is impressively spare. Barely a scene or image is wasted – even seemingly inconsequential characters or encounters prove seeds for important plot developments. He weaves Hemingway’s blunt sentences and carved dialogue with the old-fashioned storytelling of a folk tale, imbued with the dark romance of a Nick Cave ballad. (“... all he inherited was broken or delivered stillborn. The one cherished thing bequeathed him by the past was the memory of his mother.”)
The Mary Smokes Boys is a novel of ideas – about Australia’s towns and cities, about our relationship with nature, about the nature of faith – but it’s also a character-driven suspense story, balancing a driving sense of menace with a deep human connection at its heart.
This review was first published by The Age.
October 9, 2014
Recently I've been drawn to stories with roots in nature or characters who are connected to nature in some way. I like how moods and events are linked to the setting and the weather; it feels very "Australian Bush". Everything about Mary Smokes Boys is so familiar to me (particularly as I live half an hour down the road from where it is set); I can clearly see the countryside and the characters seem like a patchwork of fellows I could meet at my local pub. It didn't really drag me in. I'm not good at distinguishing things I don't like so I can't put my finger on it but I just didn't really enjoy the book. It's tragic, dark and deeply intense in parts but that's not usually off putting for me. The writing feels very masculine but again, I have thoroughly enjoyed much more male oriented writing. I did like the relationship between Grey and Irene. It is not like any other relationship I've ever read and I found the love between two poor outcast souls strange and warming. In any case, I'm glad I read it.
July 30, 2012
This has been the hip underground novel in Australia for a year or so now, (though it was shortlisted for a couple of major prizes, so I guess a few of the mainstream media people must have gotten hold of it). Anyway, after months of putting it off due to uni and a pile of 'to read' books waist high, I pulled it from the middle to get it read before Holland's
next novel comes out in September. And this morning I finished it. Oh my goodness. So much raw talent! Sure, there are a couple of parts I would have loved to take an editors scalpel to, just to keep the book focussed on what it is that really makes it magical. I'm not a fan of flashbacks in fiction, and this book has one quite long one that could have been done away with. But there is too much that is good, nay great, here
to give it anything less that 5 stars.
next novel comes out in September. And this morning I finished it. Oh my goodness. So much raw talent! Sure, there are a couple of parts I would have loved to take an editors scalpel to, just to keep the book focussed on what it is that really makes it magical. I'm not a fan of flashbacks in fiction, and this book has one quite long one that could have been done away with. But there is too much that is good, nay great, here
to give it anything less that 5 stars.
December 18, 2012
I wish I could give seven stars. I have never read anything like it. More like a painting or a piece of music than a novel. Or perhaps like a dark and beautiful dream. The Darkest Little Room is an extraordinary book, and just as violent and beautiful, but this is quieter, darker, stranger. My favorite book of all time.
September 20, 2014
Just read this for the second time and it was even better than I thought it was. If I was made put a hundred dollars on any heretofore written Australian novel to still be read in a hundred years, Nobel and Booker Prize winners factored in, it would be this one. Just wait and see.
February 15, 2016
This is the strangest book I have ever read. There is nothing like it. And it's one of the most beautiful.
Read
December 9, 2015Sometimes great writing sometimes it seemed that words were missing or added incorrectly. But overall an ok read.
January 29, 2019
My second book by patrick Holland in as many months. This is so so strange, dark and beautiful. Even a better book than The Darkest Little Room.
January 11, 2022
i did not understand a singular plot point of this book, but i felt like an adult for still finishing it
September 5, 2025
Had the potential to reach emotional depths, but it ended up just flat lining to the end.
December 20, 2010
This a haunting story of lost boys on the fringe of today's modern world, living outside the norm, but peering back through the window pane to find a way in.
Patrick Holland's writing is spare and quite beautiful.
We slowly get to know Grey North, his sister Irene, his father and the wild boys who are as much his family as those who share his blood. This is life on the edge, life that clings to existence by the finger tips, precariously surviving against the odds.
Grey will stay with me for some time. His love of Irene, his confused identity, his ambiguous longing for a future where he can make his way in the world and yet his fear of that world. Very well drawn.
But where Holland really excels is in his descriptions of the natural forces, wind, water, fire, the eternity of the stars.
My rating just makes it to 4 stars. This reads like an early novel, but an early novel from a writer with depth and real potential.
Have a read and make your own view. Holland deserves to be widely read.
Patrick Holland's writing is spare and quite beautiful.
We slowly get to know Grey North, his sister Irene, his father and the wild boys who are as much his family as those who share his blood. This is life on the edge, life that clings to existence by the finger tips, precariously surviving against the odds.
Grey will stay with me for some time. His love of Irene, his confused identity, his ambiguous longing for a future where he can make his way in the world and yet his fear of that world. Very well drawn.
But where Holland really excels is in his descriptions of the natural forces, wind, water, fire, the eternity of the stars.
My rating just makes it to 4 stars. This reads like an early novel, but an early novel from a writer with depth and real potential.
Have a read and make your own view. Holland deserves to be widely read.
November 29, 2013
I really wanted to enjoy this book, but alas, I couldn't. I got to page 66 and had to stop, which is a rarity. It was the characters. They just didn't hold water for me. There were other aspects as well that tested my suspension of disbelief too much to ignore. It felt like Holland was trying to create this fantastic world of horse thieves and adolescent gunslingers--drawn from an array of his favourite books and authors and stories, I suspect (of which Cormac McCarthy must certainly be one)--that was situated in a time and place that just didn't fit. Anyway, I could go into more detail about what exactly it was I couldn't swallow, but I'd rather just move on. Other people I'm sure will enjoy this book, it just wasn't the one for me.
May 27, 2015
Patrick Holland writes sparely and beautifully about the lives of a family and their neighbors in a small, nearly extinct town in Australia. You can really sense the landscape and characters. However, be prepared for a "downer". If you like happy endings, this is not the book for you. It starts off with tragically, continues on with hopelessness, poverty and desperation, and finishes on despair. Beautifully expressed, but sad.
March 22, 2016
Holland is a gifted writer and in this short novel paints a bleak picture of a young man growing up in a rural area West of Brisbane. Grey's mom died, his dad is an alcoholic and his young sister depends on him. Grey is obsessed with protecting his sister, at a loss to carve out a fulfilling future. The story is not uplifting but it is a poignant exploration of friendship, loss and love. Hard to characterize. Some stunning writing. Worth reading for that alone.
January 22, 2011
The most extraordinary novel of 2010. The tale of a band of horse thieves and one's sister, Irene, who is always under threat, and the Australian landscape they inhabit, is so beautifully and precisely rendered, the only comparisons I can make are to Hemingway and McCarthy, though Holland not as consciously grandiose as the later. A shattering masterpiece.
August 25, 2012
Some have called this book simple, it may seem so at first, but it's anything but. Some of the scenes between the brother and sister are so incredibly strange and intense I still hardly know what to make of them, only that they made me think, with a bit of rewiring, this book could be a book of the Old Testament as easily as a contemporary novel. Why am I only finding out about this man now?
July 8, 2013
It is the typical Australian Stimmungsroman, where the weather and season tend to guide the moods of the characters. All set in the recent past. And typically it is a read but once to read but once you put the book down you don't feel like picking it up again. I did however, and the ending, although perhaps to carefully crafted, was worth it!
December 31, 2022
Meh. Maybe I've read too many novels about a young man in rural Australia. Nothing much happens in the first two thirds of the books, then all the tragedy in the last third. Some good writing about horses. This is presumably literary fiction..it was chosen by my bookclub from the limited books available at amalgamated book clubs of Albany
November 3, 2014
The book had beautiful, descriptive language and wasn't at all offensive with language or content, but I felt like it ended kind of abruptly with no real story. I felt like it was the beautiful start of what could have been a really interesting story, but it was over before it got there.
October 17, 2011
This book has to be appreciated for its simplicity. You feel the despair of the characters and have to be careful not to transfer it to yourself. It reminds me of boys from Sarina Qld.
April 2, 2013
Awesomely atmospheric. Some lovely moments. Took me entirely inside a place I haven't otherwise been. Should be 3.5, but that's not an option...
September 15, 2012
Moving, haunting, beautifully written!
December 9, 2012
Very local and therefore interesting
March 7, 2015
Really enjoyed this. A well told story. Could be 5 stars but a little tough medicine to swallow.
November 24, 2011
Evocative and poetic writing. An absolute delight to read.
September 10, 2016
Lyrically written book set in the Brisbane area. Sad lives of young people going nowhere.
Displaying 1 - 28 of 28 reviews