No One

by John Hughes

*Longlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award 2020* In the ghost hours of a Monday morning a man feels a dull thud against the side of his car near the entrance to Redfern Station. He doesn’t stop immediately. By the time he returns to the scene, the road is empty, but there is a dent in the car, high up on the passenger door, and what looks like blood. Only a man could have made such a dent, he thinks. For some reason he looks up, though he knows no one is there. Has he hit someone, and if so, where is the victim? So begins a story that takes us to the heart of contemporary Australia’s festering relationship to its indigenous past. A story about guilt for acts which precede us, crimes we are not sure we have committed, crimes gone on so long they now seem criminal-less. Part crime novel, part road movie, part love story, No One takes its protagonist to the very heart of a nation where non-existence is the true existence, where crimes cannot be resolved and guilt cannot be redeemed, and no one knows what to do with ghosts that are real.

Genres: Australia, Fiction, Novella, Book Club

188 pages, Kindle Edition

First published April 1, 2019

About the author

Sydney-based Australian writer

John^^^^^^^^^Hughes

Reviews

[Neale · Rating 4 out of 5]

Shortlisted for the 2020 Miles Franklin Award.

Ostensibly this short novel is about a man wracked with guilt because he thinks he has hit somebody with his car and never stopped to find out, never looked back. He spends his days trawling the hospitals, police stations, desperately hoping to find the person that he thinks he has hit.

In fact, the reader will quickly find it is a novel about the unnamed man and his history. His parents fled not one country but two, escaping first Iraq, and then Turkey, eventually landing in Australia. Our protagonist’s father ran off into the bush as soon as their boat hit the shores and our man was bounced around from town to town, foster parents to foster parents, all in all, seven times.

As he searches for the man or woman that he thinks he has hit with his car, people and objects evoke memories from his transient past, and this past, as you can imagine with all the moving and different towns leads to some interesting anecdotes. As he searches, he ponders and muses, posing philosophical questions to himself. The writing is very descriptive, but at times the wayward narrative sometimes becomes a little too wayward and becomes disjointed, unraveling like a ball of wool, and can feel like a collection of vignettes cobbled together with the same unraveled wool, the author rolling them back together back into the ball trying to keep the narrative together. It is a shame because there are passages in this book where the writing is sublime and the subject matter interesting and compelling, with some extremely enjoyable facts and stories. However, as if in contradiction to these passages there are times where it just seems like waffle and superfluous thoughts.

There is a great relationship he forms with this young aboriginal girl who he refers to as the “Poetess”. Her character was the highlight of the book for me. There is a sexual tension between the two and the Poetess has lived life tough. She is quiet but has this, how is the best way to describe it? She is like a coiled spring which at any moment could violently uncoil and release a tension both furtive and powerful. There is a great passage where she displays this, probably my favourite part of the novel. She says what she thinks, straight up, and the word “guile” is not in her vocabulary. She possesses a razor-sharp wit that she wields frequently. The two form a peculiar friendship and she helps him in his pursuit.

There is something about this novel which just does not click with me. It feels like an opportunity has been missed. It is by no means a bad novel, and as I have said beforehand parts of it are brilliant with superb writing,

“I have not been able to obliterate the past completely, my life, I now see, has really been no more than a chipping away at its solid mass, chipping away as a sculptor at a block of stone until, rather than the emergence of a shape, there is nothing but powder at my feet.”

With this novel, Hughes touches on subjects such as domestic violence, refugees, racism and the guilt of colonization and genocide of the indigenous population, a guilt that cannot be assuaged by the current generation. And perhaps this is what the guilt felt by the protagonist is meant to portray, a guilt that he cannot assuage. I do think a major premise of this novel is the protagonist’s self-discovery through memories he uncovers. Memories that he had either forgotten or repressed,

“The scar tissue of memory grows as hard as shell. Or at least it does until you want something to remain. Then the trying to remember is like an acid that dissolves all it clings to. Perhaps the only way to remember is to try to forget so that what stays is like the perfume of a flower -or, better yet, a barehanded snatching from the flames. I can feel it now, the memory, pushing like shadow at my feet, quiet and grey. The ash that remains.

A decent and at times very enjoyable read. 3.5 Stars.

[Nat K · Rating 3 out of 5]

***Shortlisted for the Miles Franklin 2020 ***

"Strange how memory often seems to withold what it knows."

What a unusual book. It has a heavy, dreamlike atmosphere. Like when you're first awake, but not yet fully functional. Kind of groggy.

"For a long time I used to drive around the city at night, but why I found myself in the ghost hours of that Monday morning on Lawson Street I can no longer recall."

Our protagonist is a bit of a loner. We never find out his name. He seems to drift from bedsit, to shared accommodation. He's unable to work, though he was a uni student at one point. He drives around a lot, with no clear destination in mind.

His thoughts keep him awake, late into the night. When the radio cannot lull him to sleep, he gets in his car. Because he "...likes to drive when it's dark and the streets are empty."

I know many of the streets, suburbs and landmarks the protagonist finds himself in. The descriptions of the inner city setting is spot on. There's a wonderful line "There must have been people everywhere; I could hear their echoes through the walls." That air of desolation. That despite so many people living within crowded confined spaces, feelings of alienation are somehow amplified by this fact.

On one of these late night drives, he thinks he may have run someone over. The dent in the side of the car seems to suggest he did, as does the traces of blood on the road. But there's no-one to be seen.

To assuage his guilt, he does the rounds of nearby hospitals to see if the injured person has checked themselves in.

"I think I hit someone in my car, four nights ago."

Through his search, we learn of his background as a refugee. That his parents fled across two countries, ending up on Australia's shores, with him ending up as an orphan. I lost count of the number of cities and towns he lived in. And that's without including the outback and regional areas he also lived in. Transience seems to be in his blood.

The vignettes about his childhood and reflections on growing up, show what a speckled past so many people have. How the sum of our parts is often made of patchwork.

In his search for the answer to whether he did or did not commit a crime, he falls into a relationship with a young Aboriginal woman, whom he names The Poetess. She seems to be even more displaced than him, with an equally scarred childhood.

This book has an air of resignation about it. As if this is as good as it gets, so there's no point in wishing for more.

"Hope is not so far from despair as you think."

The story is an intriguing mix of searching for an identity, while perhaps not really wanting to find one. As sometimes it's easier to keep on moving rather than to commit to anything.

There's a lot of pondering in this book. Random thoughts meandering in all sorts of directions. Timelines jump between his childhood in various foster homes, in different parts of the country, to the time of the possible hit and run, which it turns out had happened nineteen years previously.

There are reminisces about reminisces.

"I would have settled for something less than love."

"I've been searching all my life for something that doesn't exist."

I enjoyed John Hughes' style of writing. It has an air of melancholy without being depressing. He has a knack for describing the urban landscape with razor sharp precision. And a way of taking discordant threads to create a story which left me wondering about human nature and karma.

3.5 ☆ intrigued stars.

[Kim · Rating 4 out of 5]

Packs a lot into a very short fascinating novella. I don't think I can improve on the blurb for a description about the book. It's definitely a novella for now. Refugees, finding your place, forgotten languages, first nations people, domestic violence, urban isolation. Covers so much. Very pleased that it has a place on the Miles Franklin long-list otherwise it might not have appeared on my radar.
There maybe a slight question about misappropriation of other's stories but it has an authentic quality about it. It feels like the author has managed to really place themselves in the character's shoes.

[Mary Camilleri · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a beautifully written novella trying to answer “what happened” across many layers - individually, racially, nationally, historically ... it is about the pursuit of uncertainty to an extreme level. Where have we come from? What is our responsibility to the past we didn’t create? The exploration of the mind of a refugee from Iraq, displaced so many times by family, governments, acquaintances. How the narrator parallels his story with the Poetess’ indigineity and all it has cost her and her peoples. Hughes’ combines vivid imagery with sound effects that have accompanied the narrators life: dull thuds, music, violence, gun shots ... laughter even at times. There’s a sense of pervasive secrecy that perhaps we are not prepared to face in our national history and our disregard for the dignity of the First Australians and refugees. An amazing novella. I have so much to learn about our world!

[George · Rating 4 out of 5]

An engaging, clever, interesting short novel about ghosts, memory and identity. A man reflects upon a short time in his life, nineteen years ago, when as a young man living in inner Sydney. One night in his car, he believes he hit someone. He stopped his car but could find no one. For the next few days he tries to find out who he hit. He meets a young aboriginal woman and begins living with her. During the story the man recalls his life as an orphan. He travelled from Turkey to Australia when he was nine years old.

A worthwhile read about the search to understand the past. There are a number of well written, thought provoking sentences. For example, when commenting on colonization, the author writes, “the crime continues, only it’s a criminal-less crime now, which means it can never be solved”.

This book was shortlisted for the 2019 Miles Franklin award.

[Natasha (jouljet) · Rating 2 out of 5]

A man driving at night in Redfern hears a bump, and thinks he hit something or someone. He goes looking for who he may have hit, to do what is not clear, and in the process gets involved with a woman her calls The Poetess.

This feels like a character study, although just a surface level. Pulling a man from a multiple faceted traumatic background, having him entangled with the story of an Aboriginal woman also with a multi-trauma history and present, has much to explore - but then this only scratched the surface of these nuances for me. I stopped to look up John Hughes at a point, to work out if these were his experiences, but they didn't appear to.

The sense of being one step removed from the story, and the slices of memories, kept me only mildly interesting in this tale.

There was also some unsettling use of racial terms, that irked me. The complexity of the protagonists' background has so much potential, too, to be richer if fully formed.

I think this read has reinforced my lost interest in reading male authors unless it's own voices, which I rarely do now. Just not enough depth for me.

[Sammy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Exquisitely sparse, haunting and luminous. Reading No One was an eerie and alienating experience, conjuring up a mind so far from my own and yet, somehow, on some disjointed, lonely plane, someone I could understand only too well.

Shortlisted, with good reason, for the 2020 Miles Franklin Award, Hughes' short novel is a meditation on trauma, loss, identity, and memory. His prose is never difficult, never dense, but one feels a conscious emptiness in the spaces between, in the words unspoken. It is rare to feel both broken and wiser after reading a novel, but this was such an experience for me.

[Di · Rating 3 out of 5]

A man remembers an event that occurred 19 years before. He was driving around Sydney late at night - he felt a dull thud "like a roo hitting the side of the car". "I had almost driven past Redfern Park before I pulled over to the kerb to collect my thoughts." In this opening paragraph, the dreamlike novella sets the scene. We are in Australia and in urban aboriginal Australia at that. The book is a reverie on many things "why had I not looked in the mirror the moment after I heard the thud...why all those injunctions against looking back? I thought of Orpheus, and Lot's wife turned to a pillar of salt. I though again of my dream. The face had seemed so clear to me that I was certain I knew it, and yet when I woke there was nothing: like a photograph handled too often, it had lost its definition and faded without a trace, the sense of loss it left behind a phantom limb."(p14)
We follow the reverie through the past life of the protagonist, his family, his travels in Australia, his relationship with a young woman The Poetess, who helps him his quest to find the victim and then disappears.
He returns to the scene nineteen years later and finds a hospital in ruins, "a spaghetti of sewerage pipes"... "a cookbook, its pages laced by silverfish." (p156) and a sense that the elusive face in the mirror may have been his own dark face. "It came to me then that for some time now the past had been a hospital. It hadn't occurred to me that it too might be waiting for things that didn't exist." (157)

[Wendy · Rating 3 out of 5]

"It's that most of what is important in a story is outside saying."

Ostensibly a book about a man who hit someone with his car and ran, spending weeks and months after trying to find the "victim" of his crime. But really about a man in search of himself. He is the one that has been "hit" by life and he remains an absence to himself.

An Afghan refugee in Australia, abandoned by his parents, growing up in foster homes around Australia, and now, as an adult, drifting and indigent. This book provides yet further proof for the anti-natalist mantra that people need to stop breeding. There is such profound sadness and despair in this story: not for the faint-hearted.

This book is about the unseen in Australian society. The wounded and those living in the limbo of life, not convinced or engaged in the mass hypnosis that "life is good" and not dead, yet.

My favourite character "The Poetess" is an indigenous young woman, whose face bears the scars of cuts made by a violent partner. She is a pessimist philosopher who is fearless in the face of the ugliness of life and for some reason is helping our protagonist in his quest to find his hit and run victim (the search being a plot device that did not necessarily work for me and took away from the fundamental power of this story). She said this at one point and won my heart: " 'Fuck healing' was what she said. 'Stop making the wound.' " Yup, my kinda woman. Fuck healing. Stop making the wound.

There is writing that is sublime scattered through these pages, not consistently enough, however.

There is wisdom too that is worth gleaning through some of the messy plot devices.

"My existence had been plunged into time like an endlessly spinning wheel suspended half in the air and half in the water, 'birth' and 'death' no more than the equivalents of the border between two mediums, the checkpoints at which time's direction changes, neither origin nor end, merely moments of oblivion."

True and dark and a welcome view into a world of people suffering from neglect in this unkind world.

Just misses though, in my view.

[Sam · Rating 3 out of 5]

The story here slips around as elusive as a dream, or the memory the main character is trying to recall. Or the truth. And what is the truth? Perhaps that is what the author wants us to think about. I enjoyed the writing, there is a lot going on here so it took me a lot longer than usual to read which is probably a good thing. But in the end, it’s easy to leave. The cover is just about perfect.

[Kate · Rating 3 out of 5]

When a man thinks he may have hit someone with his car, he begins a journey of discovery. He looks for the man he may have hit, but finds memories that have been locked away for years as well as friendships and crimes that have survived time and discovery. This is a good read that describes contemporary Sydney and our ever changing cultural influences.

[Gregory Sale · Rating 5 out of 5]

There is so much in this book, I came across it by chance spying the title in an article on the NSW Premier's Literary Awards for 2020. It is a short book, a novella in fact, but it took me a fortnight to read there was so much in it, big recommend - loved it.
This is a story of a crime without a victim, it is about a man's attempt to find who he hit with his car in the early hours of a morning, he searches everywhere. At its most basic level "No One" is simply a mystery without a resolution. It’s not even clear whether a crime has been committed — there’s certainly no victim unless we consider that the man himself is the victim of his own paranoia and sense of guilt. The whole story is a metaphor for the relationship that contemporary Australia’s has to it's indigenous past. It is a story about guilt, guilt for acts which precede us, crimes we are unsure we have committed, crimes gone on so long they now seem criminal- less.
It is so thought provoking, are we removed by time from the moral responsibility that we have to our indigenous. We most certainly are not, we as descendants of the "victors" have benefitted from all the things that were done the indigenous, the dispossession, the prejudice, the genocide.
The narrator is the child of Turkish immigrants who died in the attempt to make a better life for their son in Australia. He was raised in a series of orphanages and foster homes in various wild and remote places, the experience of which shaped his outlook on life and left him with a feeling of separateness from the Australian culture. He becomes a transient in his adult life living in a boarding houses on the "outskirts". His happiest time according to his own reflection, the book covers a lot of years, was when he teamed up with an aboriginal woman, "The Poetess". They bond through mutual loneliness and she joins him in his quest, they deal with her violent ex-partner who was responsible for her scar-ravaged face, a story in itself.

[Gavan · Rating 5 out of 5]

A brilliant book that deserves much higher recognition than it has received to date - although being on the Miles Franklin longlist might help (I've read 8/10 so far & my personal top 2 are this & Philip Salom). Beautifully crafted prose; very thoughtful & thought provoking. There should be more books like this.

[Lisa · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have all sorts of good reasons for reading this novella by Sydney author John Hughes.  I have just posted a giveaway for his new book The Dogs, of which I also have my own copy via my subscription to new publishing venture Upswell and (in a rare moment of self-discipline when it comes to the TBR) I thought I ought to read No One first.  I've had since it was nominated for the 2020 Miles Franklin.  And because it's only 157 pages long, that also makes it a good flag-bearer for Novellas in November, hosted by Cathy at 746 Books. However, now that I've read it, I have another good reason: I think No One is destined to be a classic of Australian literature, and people will be reading it for many, many years to come.

Yes, that's a big call.  But Miles Franklin judges aside, there is plenty of other praise for this deceptively simple story.

Kim at Reading Matters: 'Rich in language, in metaphor and allegories, and told in an episodic, languid and dreamlike fashion, No One is about alienation, belonging and Australian identity;'
Jack Cameron Stanton at the SMH says it's 'about the fractured identity of Australian society, delivered with an allegorist’s sensibility;'
Christine Kearney at the Canberra Times calls it haunting and masterly;

and, comparing Hughes to the 2014 Nobel prize winning author Patrick Modiano,

George Kouvaros at the Sydney review of Books: 'The capacity of the past to return in a manner that unravels our place in the present links No One to the work of perhaps the greatest living novella writer, Patrick Modiano.'

And that's just the reviews that weren't behind the paywall...

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2021/09/15/n...

[Ian · Rating 1 out of 5]

I only struggled on to finish this book because it's so short, if it hadn't been a novella, I would have given up on about page 50. It's a rambling first-person account of a traumatic childhood leading to struggles with obsessive, hyper-anxious and depressive thoughts. So not a fun read.

I'm sure there's a message buried in here somewhere, but the writing is so opaque that I couldn't really find it. It reminded me a little of how I felt after reading ‘Catcher in the Rye’ around 30 years ago and which equally disappointed, dissatisfied and slightly irritated me in just the same measure. The unnamed hero of No One, despite the difference in their backgrounds, seems to be very similar to Salinger’s equally self-obsessed Caulfield; and I didn't really like either of them.

[Cristo · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book started to travel along numerous routes but never seemed to reach a destination.
Sure I got the overall awful and appalling foster father treatment but the book just skimmed over too many issues without any depth. Obviously that can't happen adequately in a novella of this length, but often it was just irritating to me.
My heart went out to the Poetess and the way she accepted the glassings but she fired up when she saw someone else getting hurt.
Over all, this book served as a reminder of how much f***ed up stuff happens in this world...

[Blair · Rating 5 out of 5]

A searing examination of a damaged life and a haunted past, both of the narrator and Australia itself, each of which is consumed by guilt for a crime that somehow no one seems to have committed. Told in enigmatic fragments of memory that centre around the possibility that the narrator, a refugee orphan who has suffered abuse in his past that he struggles to both remember and forget, has hit someone in his car and his subsequent quixotic efforts to find his victim.

[Alice · Rating 4 out of 5]

Written by a UWA alumni and published by UWA press this is a short Australian novel that peers into the mind and soul, making the reader question their upbringing, the understanding of memory formation and how fluid the past is. Then it takes you deeper still. Thought provoking and definitely different to what I have been reading lately but intriguing. I feel I need to read it a few more times to uncover all he mysteries and clues the author has hidden.

[Rdurie · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this short book. It is a beautifully written meditation on modern Australia, about displacement, violence, abuse, the plight of migrants and the indigenous peoples, loneliness. In style it reminded me of WG Sebald, elliptical, reflective and meandering. Hughes style is more personal, but still universal. Highly recommended. My favourite so far of the Miles Franklin nominees.

[Sandra · Rating 3 out of 5]

'Bacon paints bodies that are tortured, caged, displayed, turned inside out or outside in ( it's never clear exactly), allowed an escape but not wanting one, perhaps because, despite the mutilation, there is no suffering, it seems, no pain, which is exactly what history does to the past, to the reality of human wretchedness - history and dreams - it divests it of its pain.'

[Colette Godfrey · Rating 4 out of 5]

It takes a special talent to pack so much punch into a novella this size. To cover so many issues and stories as a blended melange and not a mess (or a beautiful mess?). To say so much without saying much at all (~150 words). To craft evocative and vivid scenes that immerse the reader with an almost sensory overload that keeps them hooked and not repelled.

[Anna Davidson · Rating 3 out of 5]

A strange little book that despite its slow, dreamlike story, had me compelled to finish reading. The blurb describes it perfectly - part crime novel, part road movie, part love story - although it feels like none of these stories are ever finished, rather, the reader is left with more questions than answers.

[Meg · Rating 3 out of 5]

A skinny but dense novel. It's not exactly enjoyable, but it's certainly not bad. I read a review explaining how the guilt about the car accident is a metaphor for guilt about colonisation. Glad i saw that because i don't think i would have worked that out on my own and it made the book much more meaningful. 3.5 stars

[Tony Bertram · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Persistence of Memory ..glimpses of guilt and loss through years and places that tumble like stones as the river of time flows.

[Damien O'Brien · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very interesting novella - worth reading

[Ben Payne · Rating 5 out of 5]

Short, dreamlike and beautiful prose. The plot isn’t particularly important, but the writing was great.

[Martin · Rating 3 out of 5]

“Memory is no encyclopaedia, no matter how irresistibly it commands belief.”

A lot 'packed' into this novella which relates an important story.
Articulate writing on every page.

[Kristen Hewitt · Rating 1 out of 5]

DNF
Might try again but probably not. Each 'chapter' was too separate from one another and left me with a disjointed and unsatisfied understanding of the story

[Diane · Rating 3 out of 5]

I didn’t enjoy this book, just a collection of thoughts that went nowhere

[Jordan Ryder · Rating 2 out of 5]

I don’t think I am smart enough to enjoy this one. Melancholy, ambiguous and a bit boring