The Pillars

by Peter Polites

Don't worry about the housing bubble, she would say. Don't worry about the fact that you will never be able to afford a home. Worry about the day after. That's when they will all come, with their black shirts and bayonets, and then you will see the drowned bodies and slit necks. And I would stand there and say, But Mum, I'm ten years old.

Working as a writer hasn't granted Panos the financial success he once imagined, but lobbying against a mosque being built across the road from his home (and the occasional meth-fuelled orgy) helps to pass the time. He's also found himself a gig ghostwriting for a wealthy property developer. The pay cheque alone is enough for him to turn a blind eye to some dodgy dealings - at least for the time being.

In a world full of flashy consumerism and aspiration, can Panos really escape his lot in life? And does he really want to?

Genres: Fiction, LGBT, Australia, Gay

257 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2019

Reviews

[Roo James · Rating 1 out of 5]

Gross. Annoying. Highly repetitive.
And now I'm dumber for having read it.

[Dave Leys · Rating 4 out of 5]

A funny, pointed, page turner. At the launch of this book Polites mentioned he'd struggled with structure and occasionally it shows in this novel. I thought the ending was mishandled, especially when it strayed into genre fiction, although the final image of the water flowing uncontrollably has stayed with me as a picture of modern Sydney. Barbed about numerous aspects of our culture - corruption, casual racism, homophobia and self-loathing, offset by a subplot about mental illness that veers between genuine pathos and misdirection. When it gets character well, as in the entitled developer, it is spot on, and the voice of the narrator at times is mostly acute and comedic.

[Jaclyn · Rating 4 out of 5]

A day in bed with this wonderful book was exactly what I needed. Skewering satire combined with profound details. It may be set in Western Sydney but I saw the strongest parallels with northern Melbourne – immigrant areas gentrified, culture replaced with consumerism, aspiration turning us all greedy. A perfect novel after his incredible debut Down the Hume, Polites is a writer with a lot to say and I’m here for it.

[Anna Baillie-Karas · Rating 3 out of 5]

Pano lives in a new suburb, helps his flatmate protest against a mosque being built & ghost writes a memoir for his friend Basil, a property developer & show-pony. I liked the honesty and seeing a different side of Sydney. But the tone is cynical & Pano unlikeable: his fixation on sex and appearances - toned bodies, designer clothes - wears thin. It’s a comment on narcissism but the characters are so shallow you don’t get to know them, so it’s hard to care.

[Zora · Rating 4 out of 5]

A book overflowing with delights for a reader like me who laps up books about a Sydney I know and recognise. Wog Sydney, Queer Sydney, Western Sydney, inner west Sydney, property obsessed Sydney. Polites is a smart and funny writer, lots to underline and read more than once. Not so great on plot, but that turned out to be an endearing feature too.

[FFRZ · Rating 5 out of 5]

I laughed and got upset and learned some things and was shocked. I’ve enjoyed both The Pillars and Down The Hume’s last minute zags into crime, gutting family tragedy and perfect cultural insights. I loved it.

[Emily · Rating 2 out of 5]

Book 17 - The Pillars by Peter Polites. Not going to say a lot about this one because I was so disappointed by it...

I adore Christos Tsiolkas, I love almost everything his written and I love the way he talks about writing. I love his gentle, thoughtful way in person which can seem at odds with his sometimes confronting, in-you-face novels. Anyway...Peter Polites has been compared to Tsiolkas. I guess because he is also gay, and urban/suburban, and Greek.

I heard this book was witty and sharp, and took a tough look at Sydney's suburbs. And I had very high expectations...which weren't met...

Whilst I found a few clever laughs in the first half, the satire was a bit too relentless for me. The obsession with skewering every character - painting them as mindless and shallow - got in the way of actually connecting with anyone. It meant that when we did start to learn more about the main character, and there were scenes that were poignant or heartfelt, which dealt with loneliness and rejection and striving to be better but losing yourself, well - I kind of didn't care anymore.

I guess my connection with this book was as shallow as the suburban gym junkie hooked on one night stands, spirit animal tattoos and replica mid-century mod furniture that Polites describes. I'm giving it two dodgy apartment developments ⭐️⭐️

[Jo-Ann Duff · Rating 2 out of 5]

I was really looking forward to The Pillars as Down The Hume was an interesting read for me with unique prose and an outstanding critical debut novel for author Peter Polites. However, The Pillars left me feeling a little empty. I wonder if that was the point?

I love a character and plot-driven novel, which is why I think I struggled with The Pillars. Polites is adept at writing about Western Sydney and living in a multicultural Australia, but I wish he would delve just as deep into the characters he creates.

Pano is the main character who lives in a lovely new apartment with his flatmate and sometime f*ckbuddy. Tensions arise in the cookie-cutter new build estate when a mosque posts an application to build nearby. Scaremongering and neighbourhood gossip about the house prices being affected ripple through the neighbourhood and even some Muslim neighbours are against having a place of worship at their door. Simultaneously Pano gets a gig ghostwriting for a prominent property developer, and the more he knows, the less he likes.

The parallel story about the property developer gives a huge, not so subtle nod to the terrible corruption and shonky construction of new-build apartment blocks which have lead to many people unable to live in their homes and some tragic accidents. There are also themes of drug use and mental health woven into the story. Pretty hot topics and very timely, yet the suspense and intensity was lacking.

I felt there was much here to explore and Polites used the pages to fill up with more sex than I was expecting and I feel this came at the expense of plot and character development and didn’t add anything to the story at all.

It is clear that Peter Polites is a very talented writer and when he nails it, he really nails it. But, for me, I was left not caring about any of the characters, but wanted to go off and read a little more about the topics which arose.

I look forward to reading Peter Polites next book as I’m intrigued to see him develop as a writer and hope that book three will deliver some characters I can connect with and care about.

[Chloe Brown · Rating 4 out of 5]

Super interesting book. I couldn’t put it down. The ended was a bit quick disjointed however which was a bit disappointing.

[Ben · Rating 2 out of 5]

There’s a scene near the end of Peter Polites’ novel The Pillars where Pano, the protagonist, watches someone he knows secretively unload asbestos from a rented shed into the back of his ute. This person has done dodgy shit before: earlier in the novel, two young women jump to their deaths from an apartment tower he developed; it was on fire because he’d skirted local zoning laws and had it built without fire escape infrastructure. So, both we and Pano know that he’s a rapacious piece of shit who cares about nothing besides making a quick buck. Anyway, when he’s discovered moving the asbestos, the two angrily confront each other; there’s yelling and red faces and thrown sunglasses and fists scrunched up at the tops of shirts. But eventually the macho property developer is completely deflated when Pano calmly makes it clear that the developer is being blackmailed. Until that moment, Mr. Property Developer had basically been a toxic masculine scapegoat; and it is only then, at the tail-end of the novel, that he transforms from a caricature into a three-dimensional human being. He is broken, afraid, despairing, regretful, overwhelmed, resentful, angry. To me, it was the first moment when this book became something more than a haphazard collection of observations about suburban life, like a Seinfeld routine that wasn’t funny; this was the moment when the book became a novel, something I’d be comfortable to call a work of art. Finally, there were things at stake! Finally, there was some dramatic tension! It looked as though people might get fucked up, and that they might fuck up other people in their turn, and that the past, present, and future might coalesce into a narrative where personalities evolve and where acts have consequences. But, alas, that moment was short-lived. Mr Developer doesn’t develop any further; indeed, he’s eclipsed almost immediately by Pano’s inexplicable transformation into a blackmailing villain, which comes out of absolutely nowhere and which is not foreshadowed or presaged in any way. It was here that I finally stopped giving this book the benefit of the doubt and admitted what I’d refused to admit for most of the book: this novel sucks.

The protagonist of the novel is Pano, a gay man, presumably in his mid-30s, who earns minimum wage as a freelance author and who lives with his landlord and occasional lover, Kane, in his house in the suburbs of Sydney. Pano, like all poor intellectuals, is resentful of both his poverty and of those people in his life who, though richer than him, are less culturally literate. He may be poor, but at least in this one way he’s got a leg up on those uncultured neanderthals. It’s a tad ironic that someone so obsessed with marginalised identities others almost everyone he meets. The objects of his complex affection are landlords, property developers, and sugar mummas, that is, the winners in contemporary Australian society, and those who are directly supported by them; and his sole method of analysing and understanding these people is through a sort of unconscious semiotics of their material possessions. This is how he others people, by treating people as objects composed of other objects, and by preferring to analyse their surface features, their components, to getting to know them as people. To Pano, every item of clothing and furniture, every tattoo, every makeup article, signifies something deep and meaningful about that person, their ethnicity, sexuality, socioeconomic status, or their politics.

Now, I don't think this kind of semiotics is useless. I’ve read Roland Barthes’ Mythologies multiple times and I found it to be original and full of genuine insights. But Barthes was a bona fide intellectual, and a French intellectual no less, who are notorious for sloppy thinking; Barthes made his daily bread by thinking about trivial things in depth; as a public intellectual, he was rewarded based on how much intellectual content he produced, so he had very real incentives to think about this stuff as though it was the whole of his life. Because it sort of was. But that is not the case for our protagonist. His endless consumption of surfaces betrays a pathological self-consciousness and a kind of narcissism. When he meets a girl with long, fake hair, he asks himself, what does that hair mean? Only, he doesn’t ask actually ask her this, the one person who is probably better suited than anyone else to answer this question about their innermost nature. No, he keeps it all in his head. He notes things about people, and infers what those things mean, but he’s almost never genuinely curious enough to engage with those people as though they’re his equals, as though they might be able to enlighten him as much as he imagines he enlightens himself. Human souls are nothing but shiny mirrors.

This is because Pano’s obsession with surfaces makes him incapable of meaningful introspection, the kind that moves beyond mere observation to the asking of questions about those observations. For me, what’s most frustrating about this is that he never passes any kind of moral judgement or has very strong reactions to anything. Even when he gets beat up, he just takes it, and doesn’t dwell on it, and the episode doesn’t affect anything further down the line or shed light on things that’ve already happened. Like tattoos, his observations, even his observations of despicable things, are all surface, no depth. They don’t go anywhere; they don’t penetrate into deeper, darker, more profound contemplations. He just doesn’t seem very human to me. He’s like Albert Camus’s Meursault from The Stranger, only stripped of that novel's rich philosophical undertones and left only with Meursault’s blank and unfathomable lifelessness. This means that when Pano/Peter Polites does pass judgement on something, it’s normally experienced by the reader as a non-sequitur, as something said in passing, disconnected from what’s happening around it. For example, Pano doesn’t stop his friend from “testing” a questionable batch of meth on a total stranger, but later he has the gall to pass judgement when mothers shield their kids’ eyes from that psychotic stranger’s penis. It’s presented as some kind of anti-capitalist critique, as though capitalist society has warped people’s priorities and made them care about the wrong things, but neither Pano nor his companions in that scene had been discussing such things, and the theme isn’t picked up later or developed in any way. It just deepens the sense that Polites didn’t write him well, that’s he unreal, that he’s missing something.

All of this would be fine if conveying a sense of the moral shallowness of things was the main point, or one of the main points, of the novel. But it’s not. I never once got the impression that The Pillars was intended by the author to be a portrait of moral degeneration, nor a portrait of ordinary humans made degenerate by an inhuman society, nor even of morally complex humans who try their darndest despite their failings to navigate a messy world. Rather, it seemed pretty obvious to me that this was an exploration of various forms of identity, although primarily of ethnic, sexual, and socioeconomic identities, and of the ways they intersect. He’s a gay man and the son of a first-generation immigrant, so he pays special attention to how ethnic men experience their homosexuality. These observations are often tragic: Middle Eastern men in particular seem to have a very conflicted relationship with their sexuality, and Pano has no end of fun observing the tragicomic ways they express (or don’t express) themselves. These observations were without doubt the best part of the book; they were sometimes genuinely insightful and revealing, and on account of them I feel like I know a bit more about what it means to be a gay man. More interesting for me, though, as an Aussie, was that this book made me feel like I know a bit more about what it means to be Australian. I forget who it was exactly, I think it might’ve been John Cleese, but I remember hearing an economist talk about the one thing they didn’t miss about being in Australia, which is that no matter where they are or what they’re doing, Australians always talk about property. It’s our national obsession. There are reasons why this is the case, but taken collectively, all of these reasons mean that Australians treat homeownership and property investment as the surest path wealth. With this in mind, the protagonist’s evil turn at the very end of the book, which comes out of nowhere and makes no sense, becomes at least somewhat understandable. But this specific cultural understanding isn’t baked into the book; you have to either be an Aussie or intimately know one to get why this makes some kind of sense. But, as stated before, if Pano ever has anything bad to say about the state of things, it’s always about the abstract networks of power, money, and desire that in his mind explain why people act a certain way, that make them express their identities in a certain way. Not a single individual is ever condemned or reprimanded. No, it’s society that’s the villain. Evil isn’t buying houses for cheap after filling their roofs with asbestos; evil isn’t teenagers bashing homosexuals; evil isn’t testing dirty hard drugs on unsuspecting strangers; evil isn’t property developers building death traps; no, evil is zoning regulations, urban sprawl, getting tribal tattoos without having any awareness of their cultural significance, mums protecting their prepubescent kids from adult nudity.

For all the reasons aforementioned, the overwhelming impression I got from this novel was of impotence and malaise. Pano is unable or unwilling to change, to exert any kind of effort to live a life that doesn’t depress him; he is unable even to tell someone that what they’re doing is wrong, although he’s given plenty of chances to do so. His only ambition, and it seems the only ambition of every other person in his life, is to acquire money, property, and material possessions, such as luxury furniture and branded clothes. Early in the novel, the building of a mosque is protested because of its potential to depress local property values. Pano knows that this is why it’s being protested, and yet he goes along with it without raising any objections. Then, when the protest is successful, and when his landlord therefore declares victory and sells his house for a premium, Pano is shocked and betrayed, as though nothing whatsoever had been wrong about the events that had led up to that point. And what’s worse is that this doesn’t trigger any self-reflection. He’s forced to admit that his landlord-lover, Kane, is probably a sociopath, or at least that Kane never loved him, and that their entire relationship had been transactional and devoid of anything resembling even platonic love. But his shock and horror doesn’t make him think to himself, you know what, perhaps I was wrong to have helped Kane do this. Perhaps I’m not only a fool for helping Kane, who doesn’t love me after all and, if I’m honest with myself, never did, but I’m also an asshole for joining in this mission in the first place. It was wrong to destroy this community project simply to try to enrich myself. Pano doesn’t doubt himself; he doesn’t doubt, resolve to change, and grow. There is zero—zero—character development, even though the author’s given him an excellent prompt.

I could go on. Although I dislike this book, I think it says a lot about what it means to be (a particular and common kind of) Australian, and for that reason alone I have lots to say about The Pillars. But that’s in large part due to me reading things into the book, and less to do with the book consciously and deliberately dealing with contemporary social matters with any kind of seriousness and depth. He’s no Houellebecq, with a deep and sincere drive to understand the broader sociological trends of where he lives. He’s observant in the way that a narcissist is observant, that is, about only his immediate surrounds, and he’s revealing only because everyone he encounters appears to be a lot like him, in other words, superficial, amoral, and money-hungry. His endless status signalling, the narcissism that saw him seesaw between feelings of (cultural) superiority and (financial) inferiority, and his obsession with systemic social issues yet indifference to the grossly immoral acts that happen right before his very eyes, painted a grotesque picture of a moral failure, which in my eyes makes him somewhat subhuman. He is literally the kind of hypocrite who denounces capitalism yet pounces on an opportunity—a conventionally, straightforwardly immoral opportunity, one that might put his own mentally ill mum at risk of severe health complications—to become rich and to profit from the very same system that he claims to hate.

In the end, The Pillars a bad novel: it’s repetitive, its characterisation sucks, there’s no sense of narrative development. But it’s also, for all its flaws, an interesting depiction of the way people actually live and experience the world, right here, right now. This book is ugly, trashy, true. And only because I'm an Aussie, I might reread it for that reason alone.

[James Whitmore · Rating 5 out of 5]

The narrator of The Pillars is Pano, a late-20s/early-30s prose poet of Greek descent living in Western Sydney. He lives with Kane, an IT consultant with tribal tattoos who jokes that Pano should call him "landlord", not "housemate". That is significant in a novel where property power is everything and each word seems to take on a menacing aura.

Kane becomes obsessed with fighting a proposed mosque down the road, which he is concerned will lower the suburb's property values. He convinces Pano, with sexual gratification that Pano mistakes for a healthy relationship, to help him in his campaign. I'm not sure this is saying a lot about the relationship between gays and Islam, beyond people being self-serving hypocrites; it's played more for shock-value and humour.

More complex is the ghost-writing gig Pano is doing for Basil, a waxed-smooth fuckboy property developer Pano went to highschool with. And in flashbacks we see Pano's relationship with his Greek heritage and his mother, who can't work thanks to factory-induced asthma and suffers from some kind of debilitating psychosis. This feminine relationship maybe, just maybe, offers Pano some kind of salvation, or at least a power he can draw on.

Pano, to put it plainly, is a wet wipe. Internally virtuous, he goes along with all sorts of questionable schemes to be validated by others. He's a walking result of toxic homo-masculinity. His late transformation into anti-hero, or just straight up villain, comes as a relief. Finally someone we can cheer for in this fucked up world! Underneath it all though is the agony of displacement, of being separated from who you are; it is this that stops the novel becoming a "burn it all" screed.

This is a novel set against Australia's ridiculous housing market inequalities. Western Sydney is a place in flux, where the old migrant community is being rapidly displaced by an influx of cheap, poorly-constructed apartment complexes. Like Polites' previous novel, Down The Hume, The Pillars operates primarily in a noir mode. Cynicism rules, morality is ambiguous, and identities can be manipulated to achieve whatever their possessor wants. It's a world where the fucked-up-ness of late capitalism means you can only join in, or be crushed into the ground.

Polites' writing has the clarity and incisiveness you would expect of a prose poet. It is as clean and empty (in a good way) as the housing estates and property developments sweeping Pano's suburbs. People are reduced to brands, commodities and body parts; the sex is transactional, and hot. The Pillars is often funny, but its humour is ultimately subsumed to its grim outlook.

[Ryan · Rating 2 out of 5]

I struggle through this. At least the sexual encounters were very graphic to keep me interested partially. Not saying i want to read mills and boons now.

[Elias Jahshan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Love a book that’s hard to put down. The Pillars was just that: a story that unflinchingly tackles ageism, racism, homophobia, Sydney’s housing market & the “gay bubble”. Peter Polites' writing style is so damn refreshing. His debut Down The Hume is also great.

[Sarah · Rating 3 out of 5]

October book club choice.
Started off well, but not really sure it went anywhere… some genuinely funny moments and some quote-worthy paragraphs.

[Lisa · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Pillars is fascinating.  For a start, its moneyed milieu certainly redefines 'disadvantage' in Western Sydney.  It features a Greek-Australian wannabe writer called Pano, whose lovestruck interest in upwardly mobile Kane leads him to (a) get involved in lobbying against a mosque being built across the road from the swanky apartment they share, and (b) ghostwriting a bio of a wealthy property developer.

Although Pano and Kane engage in a fair bit of (graphically described) energetic sex, being lovestruck is hampered by Kane's insistence that Pano refer to him as the landowner, not a flatmate. The lobbying involves various dubious strategies, including Pano pretending to be Muslim so that the local newspaper can feature his objections.  The bio involves hanging out with a flashy character called Basil and confronting the dilemmas of any ghost writer who discovers that his subject is Not a Nice Person at all.

What was most fascinating for me was the issue of branding and behavioural codes.  Pano is incredibly attentive to brands, clothing styles and decor codes.  He has worked hard on his own subservience to brands as an entrée to the kind of social status he aspires to, and he is amazingly observant about the ways women in his community style their bodies and clothes for different occasions.

For the first meeting of the committee to oppose the mosque, Pano prepares the nibbles.

On one side of a blue-and-gold Jonathan Adler Versailles-style serving platter I arranged quartered cucumber sandwiches with the points upwards.  On the other side of the platter were baked halal samosas for Wally.  I put the culturally appropriate platter on the table and arranged tall green bottles of mineral water around it.

I made catering suggestions for the meeting, keen to show Kane I could host.  Perhaps nuts and seeds in bowls, next to haloumi and feta with slices of Greek sourdough.  But Kane's tastes extended only to the range of foods he grew up with.  My ideas were too out there.  When he said the words 'too out there', I no longer tried to advocate my people's cuisine.  As a serf in the house, I deferred to the landowner. (p.24)

Lorna was the first to arrive.

As I was wiping a few crumbs off the edge of the platter, the doorbell chimed, and Kane opened the door.  Before Lorna stepped into the house, she looked down the hallway and saw me standing in the kitchen.  Her hair was freshly straightened and she wore a cold-shoulder fuchsia blouse made from a shiny material.  The blouse draped over her body, showing her décolletage, collarbones as refined as an alloy.  She wore selvedge denim jeans in a loose boyfriend style with gold stitching.  One her feet were Adidas Originals three stripes.  Her look could be called suburban exceptionalism — an outfit suitable for a trip to the supermarket or enjoying a glass of moscato at book club. (p.25)

Another guest, Wally, is also faking ethnicity for acceptance, but he errs by asking what country the (rainbow) flag in the hallway belonged to.   Pano tells him

... it was from one of those Scandinavian countries in Northern Europe.  Wally praised the flag's brightness and I mentioned how much I liked the clean lines of Scandi furniture. (p.26)

The Pillars is full of moments like this which will have your lips twitching in amusement...

Lorna, suffering the fog of new motherhood is their PR agent, with previous experience of a rugby team called the Deities...

The Deities were the heart of Western Sydney, its real mascots, godlike and always in the news for sexual assaults, cocaine bust-ups and forcing abortions on the model girlfriends they met through social media. (p.28)

Lorna trains these men for camera interviews by telling them to pretend that they were apologising to their mums. 

TO read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2023/09/18/t...

[Mike · Rating 2 out of 5]

An absurdist suburban tale, The Pillars (2019) by Peter Polites, is set in current-day Western Sydney. Panos is a published author of a small book of little-known poems. He is struggling with writer’s block and accepts a job ghost-writing for a wealthy property developer. As Panos confronts his seemingly meaningless existence, he is exposed to rampant consumerism and aspiration, which he escapes by salacious indulgences (content warning of graphic scenes) and moral ambiguity. This supposed satirical account of one man’s life, is narrated with a dramatic irony and existential malaise feel. It's certainly not for everyone, but the off-beat humour and stereotypical characters, makes for a disappointing two star read rating. As always, the opinions herein are totally my own, freely given and without any inducement.

[Betty Macdonald Saudemont · Rating 3 out of 5]

TW; homophobic attack, graphic sex scenes, psychosis.⁣
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While the first half felt pretty slow, the second part finally started to keep me entertained. I enjoyed this book for a few reasons. Firstly, I live in Sydney and this is where the story is told. I love being able to relate to neighbourhoods, social constructs etc. Secondly, I loved the author's blunt, humoristic, unapologetic and satiristic approach to the story. Lastly, I very much enjoy storylines about minorities. ⁣
⁣
And although I enjoyed this book, I could see how it is not one for everyone. The novel is scatered with very graphic sex scenes and the satire can be too much at times, stopping you from connecting with the characters.⁣

[Luke Musto · Rating 2 out of 5]

After reading and enjoying Polites' first novel I was really looking forward to reading this. Unfortunately, the book was unable to live up to an interesting premise and fell back too much on satire and social criticism.

The satire came on way too heavy handed, to the point it was impossible to take the characters or plot seriously. Along with satire, Polites uses irony to attempt humour, but I felt that rather than actually being amusing it worked to undermine the novel and the themes. It really detracted from the characterisation, meaning the characters were more like one note parodies rather than fleshed out people, preventing empathy or connection with them.

The premise was interesting, however, the plot itself fell apart as it took a last minute turn to crime fiction that felt out of place as Pano suddenly decided to play detective. It all became a bit melodramatic and cliché.

I still enjoyed Polites' prose style and he did capture aspects of Sydney well. I expect he will continue to refine his craft in future novels.

[Wendy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Pana is a gay Greek struggling writer in western Sydney. This satirical novel deals with the moral complexities of what it takes to get into the Sydney property market, deal with the demons of a migrant dysfunctional childhood and be authentic and have integrity, in a world where no-one manages either. The novel is bleak, funny, scathing, observant, lyrically poetic in places and pumps (pun intended) raw sexuality in others.
I heard Peter Polites speak about his first novel Down the Hume at the Sydney Writers Festival in 2017, and his second novel does not disappoint.

[Alex Rogers · Rating 4 out of 5]

Enjoyable read - SO Sydney, set in the western suburbs, exploring the shallow end of Sydney's moral vacuity. Well written, well developed character, and some pretty hot gay sex which is different. I do love Sydney, but sometimes I despair of its property developers, council shonks and vapid fashion, and Polites captures that aspect of Sydney beautifully. It won't be everyone's cup of tea, but I enjoyed it.

[Alias · Rating 3 out of 5]

2 things:

1. Not a fan of the sex stuff. Maybe I'm homophobic or something, but having to skip through paragraphs occasionally takes out the fun. Good thing sex doesn't take up many pages of this book.

2. The quality of the story increases considerably in the last 50+ pages. There were hints of it before (like all the memories of the main character's Sarah Connor mother), but the last pages make me wonder why the whole book wasn't like this.

[David Collins · Rating 3 out of 5]

Is this an insight into the western Sydney culture? I am not entirely sure it is, but a cartoon representation it could be. Following the day to day life of a struggling writer as takes us into his life.
It's an easy read, but I didn't feel satisfied at the end of it.

[Jo Hartley · Rating 3 out of 5]

Started off really well - laugh out loud parts - and was interesting idea around fighting against the mosque. But then that kind of went nowhere and turned the story into something quite different with an abrupt ending

[Alex Mills · Rating 3 out of 5]

“The Pillars” by Peter Polites is a contemporary work set in #Sydney and explores what one critic called ‘moral grey areas’ 😏 I think that’s code for gritty queer western Sydney. I didn't like the characters, but unfortunately I recognised Western Sydney.

[Corrina · Rating 5 out of 5]

Details!! So intricate, blunt and basic. Sees people so fully...uses mundane objects, labels, actions to sum up so much.

[Lucy Birch · Rating 4 out of 5]

Dark comedy
Great prose
Funny sex scenes

[Fiona · Rating 4 out of 5]

Graphic, violent, unapologetic - exploration of the hypocrisies, inconsistencies, complexities of being ethnic, gay and without social capital in today's Sydney

[Sean Kennedy · Rating 4 out of 5]

“The Pillars: or, Horrible People Doing Horrible Things”.

[Helen Blunden · Rating 3 out of 5]

Here's my book review
https://youtu.be/c6fjZ2LdwGs

[William Freeman · Rating 2 out of 5]

I really wanted to like this book more than I did. I found it extremely cynical often stereotyped one of the main characters was a one dimensional cliche ended up a fairly disappointing read