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We Were Not Men
A novel that punches you in the the powerful, unbearably moving and ultimately uplifting story of twin brothers, Jon and Eden, as they grow up and begin to understand what it is to be men, and what it takes to knit a fractured family back together.Shortlisted for the Indie Book Awards 2022 Shortlisted for the Mud Literary Award 2022 This is a story about love. Love for nine-year-old twins Jon and Eden Hardacre is simple. Their mum, the creek that they swim in, each other – this is the love that they trust, love as clear and pure as sunlight, as honey, as water. But then there's a terrible accident. And in its wake, they develop a desperation – a yearning – to outgrow tragedy. They get older, compete with each other, fall in love with the same girl, and begin to realise that their lives – and who they love – demand something more. Something deeper. Richer. Heart-hammeringly original, intense and deeply moving, We Were Not Men is a powerhouse novel about all the various faces that love shows us and how sometimes, distracted by life, ambition or attraction, we take it for granted until it's too late – or almost too late. An unforgettable novel about the difference between getting older and growing up, from an astonishing new and original voice, pulsing with grief, hope and love. It is a revelation. 'As the author says, there is a difference between growing older and growing up, and this distinction, this tension, is at the heart of his tender, powerful debut novel... superbly intense...heartfelt.' The Australian 'Sparse, unashamedly intimate ... affecting' Books+Publishing 'A gut-punching, soul-restoring exploration of brotherhood and human bonds that bend but do not break. You'll dive in at the deep end and you won't want to stop swimming in Campbell Mattinson's words.' Trent Dalton 'Mattinson charts the rough terrain of grief with a tender, huge-hearted story of rivalry and love.'Mark Brandi
352 pages, Paperback
Published June 2, 2021
60 people are currently reading
1211 people want to read
About the author
Campbell Mattinson
8 books19 followersCampbell Mattinson has won multiple writing awards across various genres over the past 25 years but his first novel, We Were Not Men is the heart and soul of him. If you're interested in the journey of this book then see the video here but otherwise, read the book and judge the soul of him there, good or ill.
Video heree: https://vimeo.com/435984133
Video heree: https://vimeo.com/435984133
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 197 reviews
June 11, 2021
This is a beautifully written story of twin brothers and their grandmother coping with loss and getting on with life after tragedy. Jon and Eden Hardacre are 9yo when they are in a car crash which kills their parents. Their step grandmother Bobbie, also recently widowed becomes their carer. The boys are champion swimmers and there’s a lot of sporting references(many of which I didn’t get!). Jon is the narrator of the story and the early part of the novel seems very true to a young boys perception. The story follows them through the next 8 years or so. I found it hard to stop reading. Bobbie is a wonderful character, she is central to the book for me. Some of the other smaller characters are also nicely done. I was often thinking of Barracuda as I was reading although it is completely different. A good read even if you’re not into swimming or sport like me.
July 9, 2021
This was one of the most enthralling books I have read in a long time. And frustrating at times.
Early on there is a description of a car crash that kills both Jon's parents and it is one of the most powerful scenes I have ever read. Jon is a 9 year old twin of Eden and they are both in the back seat.
They are then raised by Bobbie, their step grandmother and she sometimes comes out with corkers like:
'What's the use of having a dog if you have to do the barking yourself.'
'If you want to hear what I'm trying to tell you, stop listening and just read me.'
'My feet are on holiday, but the rest of me is at work.'
'The things that make it harder, make it better.'
And Jon describes his feeling for her later on:
Bobbie wasn't either my mum or my dad but she had to be both and I thought then how I wanted to help her somehow, even if only in a little or unseen way, like a booster seat.
Jon and Eden are swimmers, probably both good enough to represent Australia at the Rio Olympics, so swimming is a big part of the story. So is unrequieted love, which nearly destroys 16 year old Jon.
This is a flawed, difficult read in some ways, but super powerful, Campbell Mattison has written a gem, his first novel in the works for 29 years.
Early on there is a description of a car crash that kills both Jon's parents and it is one of the most powerful scenes I have ever read. Jon is a 9 year old twin of Eden and they are both in the back seat.
They are then raised by Bobbie, their step grandmother and she sometimes comes out with corkers like:
'What's the use of having a dog if you have to do the barking yourself.'
'If you want to hear what I'm trying to tell you, stop listening and just read me.'
'My feet are on holiday, but the rest of me is at work.'
'The things that make it harder, make it better.'
And Jon describes his feeling for her later on:
Bobbie wasn't either my mum or my dad but she had to be both and I thought then how I wanted to help her somehow, even if only in a little or unseen way, like a booster seat.
Jon and Eden are swimmers, probably both good enough to represent Australia at the Rio Olympics, so swimming is a big part of the story. So is unrequieted love, which nearly destroys 16 year old Jon.
This is a flawed, difficult read in some ways, but super powerful, Campbell Mattison has written a gem, his first novel in the works for 29 years.
June 5, 2022
I love a story that draws you in and takes you on an emotional roller coaster and that's exactly what this book did to me.
We Were Not Men by Australian author Campbell Mattinson is a powerful and very moving novel so much so that I didn't want to put it down. An unforgettable read which I have no hesitation in highly recommending.
We Were Not Men by Australian author Campbell Mattinson is a powerful and very moving novel so much so that I didn't want to put it down. An unforgettable read which I have no hesitation in highly recommending.
July 17, 2021
There are the elements of a very good, classically Australian story here in vein of Zusak/Tsiolkas, but I felt like the execution let it down.
First and foremost is the style of Mattinson's writing - the novel is made up of many poetically written vignettes. These are often very powerful - though when an entire book is written this way, it inevitably loses impact. It also gets in the way of telling a compelling story when the writing is so dense and ~symbolic~
Don't misunderstand me - I don't need a story to be similistic or feel realistic to enjoy it. Take Trent Dalton's work for example. He has the same highly impressionistic, metaphoric style as Mattinson, yet he matches it with stories/characters that are similarly heightened.
On the other hand, We Were Not Men is a pretty standard coming of age story of twin brothers whose lives have been forever altered by significant trauma, though Mattinson does not write in a style that ever feels like it actually addresses this. It's easy to get lost.
Mainly, I think there's a dialogue problem, and this gets in the way of ever understanding the true feelings and motivations of the characters. I just have nothing to hold on to when 9 year old characters talk to each other in metaphors like philosphers, and when another character speaks almost entirely in non-sequiturs (looking at you, Bobbie). No one actually talks like these characters in real life, and if they did, people would ignore them because they would be insufferable to have a conversation with, too busy waxing lyrical instead of actually addressing what the conversation is actually about. Maybe it's just me, but I like to read dialogue from characters who actually feel like people instead of concepts, you know?
Particularly frustrating is how the important character of Carmelina is utterly wasted - I actually finished the book knowing nothing about her except as an object of desire for Jon and Eden. I struggled to understand why they actually cared for her, and yet a vast majority of the central conflict is centred on the reader accepting this fact. It ends up making much of the second half of the novel feel hollow.
All of this is disappointing, only because there is enough here for me have enjoyed the novel overall - the accident that starts the story is stunningly written (the heightened/disjointed writing actually suiting the heightened emotions of the scene), and the descriptions of swimming were always engaging. I enjoyed smaller characters like Werner, and the overall idea of Bobbie (though her dialogue was irritating in the extreme).
In the end...three stars seems right, but who knows? Maybe I'll ask Bobbie, but I doubt she'll give me a straight answer.
First and foremost is the style of Mattinson's writing - the novel is made up of many poetically written vignettes. These are often very powerful - though when an entire book is written this way, it inevitably loses impact. It also gets in the way of telling a compelling story when the writing is so dense and ~symbolic~
Don't misunderstand me - I don't need a story to be similistic or feel realistic to enjoy it. Take Trent Dalton's work for example. He has the same highly impressionistic, metaphoric style as Mattinson, yet he matches it with stories/characters that are similarly heightened.
On the other hand, We Were Not Men is a pretty standard coming of age story of twin brothers whose lives have been forever altered by significant trauma, though Mattinson does not write in a style that ever feels like it actually addresses this. It's easy to get lost.
Mainly, I think there's a dialogue problem, and this gets in the way of ever understanding the true feelings and motivations of the characters. I just have nothing to hold on to when 9 year old characters talk to each other in metaphors like philosphers, and when another character speaks almost entirely in non-sequiturs (looking at you, Bobbie). No one actually talks like these characters in real life, and if they did, people would ignore them because they would be insufferable to have a conversation with, too busy waxing lyrical instead of actually addressing what the conversation is actually about. Maybe it's just me, but I like to read dialogue from characters who actually feel like people instead of concepts, you know?
Particularly frustrating is how the important character of Carmelina is utterly wasted - I actually finished the book knowing nothing about her except as an object of desire for Jon and Eden. I struggled to understand why they actually cared for her, and yet a vast majority of the central conflict is centred on the reader accepting this fact. It ends up making much of the second half of the novel feel hollow.
All of this is disappointing, only because there is enough here for me have enjoyed the novel overall - the accident that starts the story is stunningly written (the heightened/disjointed writing actually suiting the heightened emotions of the scene), and the descriptions of swimming were always engaging. I enjoyed smaller characters like Werner, and the overall idea of Bobbie (though her dialogue was irritating in the extreme).
In the end...three stars seems right, but who knows? Maybe I'll ask Bobbie, but I doubt she'll give me a straight answer.
March 9, 2021
I finished reading “We were not men” this morning, and all I can say is WOW. I finished the book in tears, willing it to end the way I wanted. I was so involved in all of the characters. The book started with a punch in the guts, and then weaved itself beautifully until the last page. There is heartache but there is also so much happiness and discovery. It is tender and beautiful, and is one of the best books I have read in a long time. I would compare it to two of my favourite books “Infinite Spendours” by Sofie Laguna and “Bridge of Clay” by Markus Zusak. It was extremely well written and perfectly edited.
It’s not often I finish a book and feel so empty at the end… It literally took my breath away..
It’s not often I finish a book and feel so empty at the end… It literally took my breath away..
July 22, 2021
Thanks to NetGalley and HarperCollins Australia for an eARC of this book. The following review is my honest reflection on the text provided.
There is some seriously heavy content within these pages. We Were Not Men tackles death, grief, love, and unexpected family with incredible honesty and exposed nerve endings. The writing was poetic, emoting more than explaining, and most of the settings, especially those on the farm or in the water, were vivid and realistic.
Unfortunately, Campbell Mattinson's writing style just didn't work for me. It felt like the characters never actually completed a sentence; they spoke in metaphors and similes with no context and somehow they all understood each other despite the stroke victim vibe of all of their conversations. The complicated love triangle wasn't surprising - if there's never a comprehensible conversation then no one knows where they stand - but it was confusing. Carmelina didn't have much of a role or even a personality so the twin's obsession didn't make a lot of sense. By the end, I was so ready for this story to be over because the incomplete phrases and sentences were breaking my brain.
There is some seriously heavy content within these pages. We Were Not Men tackles death, grief, love, and unexpected family with incredible honesty and exposed nerve endings. The writing was poetic, emoting more than explaining, and most of the settings, especially those on the farm or in the water, were vivid and realistic.
Unfortunately, Campbell Mattinson's writing style just didn't work for me. It felt like the characters never actually completed a sentence; they spoke in metaphors and similes with no context and somehow they all understood each other despite the stroke victim vibe of all of their conversations. The complicated love triangle wasn't surprising - if there's never a comprehensible conversation then no one knows where they stand - but it was confusing. Carmelina didn't have much of a role or even a personality so the twin's obsession didn't make a lot of sense. By the end, I was so ready for this story to be over because the incomplete phrases and sentences were breaking my brain.
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August 16, 2021
THIS IS THE TYPE OF BOOK THAT SHOULD WIN ALL THE PRIZES. Sorry, but I felt like shouting this out, due to the extreme disappointment I have had these last few years with most of the long and shortlisted books, of the big name competitions.
I had such a visceral reaction to many parts of the reading of this book. Having had many encounters with grief, this is such an amazing, true feeling, story. LOVED IT.
I had such a visceral reaction to many parts of the reading of this book. Having had many encounters with grief, this is such an amazing, true feeling, story. LOVED IT.
June 4, 2021
A book of odd beauties. And those beauties are moments of Mattinson's poetics and moments in the lives of grieving teenage twins that are suffused with wonder, acceptance and forgiveness.
I took a while to get into this book. What, I think, was intended to hook me in at the start – the crash – was almost too much to comprehend, too confronting, and maybe this was a clever performance of how our two young protagonists themselves process what is happening to them, but it made me put the book away. Of course, I picked it up, put it down again because I could only manage small bites – this is down to my sensibilities. Once I got my ear in to Mattinson's music, his unique rhythms, I raced through this book. Mattinson employs deliberately disjointed writing. Conversations hang together with the most tenuous threads, the connections oblique, the darts of mind away from the centre, the side scuttle all represent the circling of the black hole of trauma. It appears to interrupt flow which is ironic in a book that spends much of its narrative examining water, how it flows, parts for the swimming body, its pull and suck, its drowning beauty.
I would describe this as not so much a coming-of-age narrative as a comin- into or back-to-self narrative. These two young boys are hurtled out of themselves, out of their known and safe world when they lose both parents (very dramatically) in a crash and have to negotiate life under the care of their eccentric and also grieving grandmother. These boys are precocious, gifted swimmers, intensely bonded and We Were not Men focuses on the strength of that bond when both boys fall for the same girl. It’s complicated.
This is a fabulous story. It has those elements that made Trent Dalton’s Boy Swallows Universe and Marcus Zusak’s Bridge of Clay so popular. We have young men whose sensitive natures and vulnerabilities are celebrated. Mattinson’s writing style reinforces the gaps, the just failing to make sense, the missing each other, of who the other is which lift this story out of melodrama. This effect of not being understood or not being comprehensible mimics the self-consciousness, sometimes idiotic, sometimes obstinate, always uncertain thinking of the teenage mind. There is a risk that stories of terrible trauma might collapse into sensationalism and this story runs the risk. Mattinson rises to the challenge. It has required device, contrivances in style of which I was at times aware but rarely to the detriment of the story.
There is no doubt Campbell Mattinson can tell a good story. He tells a bloody good story in a unique and wonderful voice. A fabulous book club pick and one I highly recommend.
I took a while to get into this book. What, I think, was intended to hook me in at the start – the crash – was almost too much to comprehend, too confronting, and maybe this was a clever performance of how our two young protagonists themselves process what is happening to them, but it made me put the book away. Of course, I picked it up, put it down again because I could only manage small bites – this is down to my sensibilities. Once I got my ear in to Mattinson's music, his unique rhythms, I raced through this book. Mattinson employs deliberately disjointed writing. Conversations hang together with the most tenuous threads, the connections oblique, the darts of mind away from the centre, the side scuttle all represent the circling of the black hole of trauma. It appears to interrupt flow which is ironic in a book that spends much of its narrative examining water, how it flows, parts for the swimming body, its pull and suck, its drowning beauty.
I would describe this as not so much a coming-of-age narrative as a comin- into or back-to-self narrative. These two young boys are hurtled out of themselves, out of their known and safe world when they lose both parents (very dramatically) in a crash and have to negotiate life under the care of their eccentric and also grieving grandmother. These boys are precocious, gifted swimmers, intensely bonded and We Were not Men focuses on the strength of that bond when both boys fall for the same girl. It’s complicated.
This is a fabulous story. It has those elements that made Trent Dalton’s Boy Swallows Universe and Marcus Zusak’s Bridge of Clay so popular. We have young men whose sensitive natures and vulnerabilities are celebrated. Mattinson’s writing style reinforces the gaps, the just failing to make sense, the missing each other, of who the other is which lift this story out of melodrama. This effect of not being understood or not being comprehensible mimics the self-consciousness, sometimes idiotic, sometimes obstinate, always uncertain thinking of the teenage mind. There is a risk that stories of terrible trauma might collapse into sensationalism and this story runs the risk. Mattinson rises to the challenge. It has required device, contrivances in style of which I was at times aware but rarely to the detriment of the story.
There is no doubt Campbell Mattinson can tell a good story. He tells a bloody good story in a unique and wonderful voice. A fabulous book club pick and one I highly recommend.
June 11, 2021
It’s been a while since I found a new favourite by an Australian author, but ‘We Were Not Men’ by Campbell Mattinson has rightfully found itself alongside Markus Zusak and Tim Winton for me. A lesson in masterful storytelling and the power of words.
_________
The story is beautiful, of love, loss and family in a compelling coming-of-age story. This is a story of two twins, faced with irreconcilable loss that find purpose in the unbreakable bond of each other and doing what they love, swimming. The opening of this story grabs you and doesn’t let go, tragedy is characterised so eloquently and shockingly. Prose becomes poetic and lyrical when describing swimming and development of these two boys.
_________
‘We Were Not Men’ was a novel that I already knew would be one of my favourites before I had even finished. I was worried that the quality would falter towards the end but instead I was left in tears with a perfectly developed and memorable ending. I expect to this one on award lists in the future, an absolute pleasure to read.
_________
The story is beautiful, of love, loss and family in a compelling coming-of-age story. This is a story of two twins, faced with irreconcilable loss that find purpose in the unbreakable bond of each other and doing what they love, swimming. The opening of this story grabs you and doesn’t let go, tragedy is characterised so eloquently and shockingly. Prose becomes poetic and lyrical when describing swimming and development of these two boys.
_________
‘We Were Not Men’ was a novel that I already knew would be one of my favourites before I had even finished. I was worried that the quality would falter towards the end but instead I was left in tears with a perfectly developed and memorable ending. I expect to this one on award lists in the future, an absolute pleasure to read.
June 1, 2021
This book is a treasure, love jumps from every page in a superb storyline! Twins Jon and Eden are nine years old as their journey commences with heartbreaking tragedy and upheaval. A brilliant story unfolds, Jon and Eden are in the care of their step-grandmother Bobbie, she’s struggling herself with the loss of her husband Jack.
Seen through the eyes of Jon, we follow the boys as they leave their home in Newport to live on Bobbie’s farm at Flowerdale, over an hour away. Jon and Eden develop their love of swimming, it’s their one constant and is relatable to their mum. Hours are spent in the farm creek or canals, their talent could take them to the Olympic Games.
Bobbie is unpredictable with a quirky side that covers her own battles, alcohol is her friend. Bobbie’s neighbour Werner shows warmth and guidance, he’s an excellent male role model and cements himself as a reliable source of comfort and strength.
Jon and Eden rely heavily on each other as they grow emotionally and physically and learn to trust and know the difference between boyhood and adult love. Jon develops feelings for his school friend Carmelina, but discovering her with Eden leaves a rift and their bond is broken, Jon escapes to be alone at the farmhouse.
This is an intensely emotional debut novel from Campbell Mattinson, an intriguing journey that tugs at the heartstrings! It’s fantastic that Mattinson has shared a bit of his own childhood and life events, woven into the story of Jon and Eden.
I voluntarily read and reviewed an advanced copy of this book. All thoughts and opinions are my own.
Seen through the eyes of Jon, we follow the boys as they leave their home in Newport to live on Bobbie’s farm at Flowerdale, over an hour away. Jon and Eden develop their love of swimming, it’s their one constant and is relatable to their mum. Hours are spent in the farm creek or canals, their talent could take them to the Olympic Games.
Bobbie is unpredictable with a quirky side that covers her own battles, alcohol is her friend. Bobbie’s neighbour Werner shows warmth and guidance, he’s an excellent male role model and cements himself as a reliable source of comfort and strength.
Jon and Eden rely heavily on each other as they grow emotionally and physically and learn to trust and know the difference between boyhood and adult love. Jon develops feelings for his school friend Carmelina, but discovering her with Eden leaves a rift and their bond is broken, Jon escapes to be alone at the farmhouse.
This is an intensely emotional debut novel from Campbell Mattinson, an intriguing journey that tugs at the heartstrings! It’s fantastic that Mattinson has shared a bit of his own childhood and life events, woven into the story of Jon and Eden.
I voluntarily read and reviewed an advanced copy of this book. All thoughts and opinions are my own.
June 18, 2021
4.5 Stars.
My review is published in the July edition of goodREADING magazine.
My review is published in the July edition of goodREADING magazine.
June 12, 2021
We Were Not Men is a coming of age book about twin brothers, Jon and Eden set in Victoria - the suburb Newport and the country area of Flowerdale. After a terrible accident their nine year old lives are transformed and they search for who they are and to come to grips with all they have to face. While swimming becomes a central focus it is their emotionally embedded competitiveness that embroils their lives both in and out of the water. While fast moving it was at times a bit too much - very graphic pictures are thrown at the reader as emotions spill over.
This is a very intense story written in a dramatic style using a lot of short, brief sentences and sometimes just words - almost poetic but also like an impressionistic painting using words -
disjointed and disturbing!
This is an incredible debut novel that is indeed on par with novels written byTrent Dalton and Sofie Laguna.
Thank you to Netgalley and publisher HarperCollins Australia for a copy to read and review.
This is a very intense story written in a dramatic style using a lot of short, brief sentences and sometimes just words - almost poetic but also like an impressionistic painting using words -
disjointed and disturbing!
This is an incredible debut novel that is indeed on par with novels written byTrent Dalton and Sofie Laguna.
Thank you to Netgalley and publisher HarperCollins Australia for a copy to read and review.
May 4, 2021
A particularly well written story of 9 year old twin brothers, Jon & Eden Hardacre, who find their world is turned upside down through a devastatingly tragic accident. Both brothers have their own physical and emotional struggles in regaining some normality in life.
Written through the eyes of the older twin, Jon, he shows us how he struggles with his own thoughts and feelings in growing up, while also looking out for his brother’s safety and success. He tells of the pleasure they derive from being together, always challenging each other to reach a higher level of excellence.
We Were Not Men is an exceptionally touching novel of the different ways love and being loved helps them to accept, forgive, grow, move forward and love in return. A true love story, very thought provoking and insightful.
Written through the eyes of the older twin, Jon, he shows us how he struggles with his own thoughts and feelings in growing up, while also looking out for his brother’s safety and success. He tells of the pleasure they derive from being together, always challenging each other to reach a higher level of excellence.
We Were Not Men is an exceptionally touching novel of the different ways love and being loved helps them to accept, forgive, grow, move forward and love in return. A true love story, very thought provoking and insightful.
July 2, 2021
I was drawn into this book by reading a sample online which blew me away. The intricate physical and emotional description of a car crash involving twin boys was so detailed and shocking that I was compelled to read on to discover how they would survive such a traumatic ordeal. I was captivated the whole way through, by the boys’ coping mechanisms, their sadness, competitiveness, their strengths and weaknesses, borne from their shared experience and the aftermath. Bleak and yet lyrically abundant, this is a bloke’s book set in an Australian landscape that feels like it was written for men to read. But the grandmother in the story adds a feminine touch and she actually has the best lines all the way through. This is not an easy book, as it is tough to read about damaged people, but it is triumphant in its celebration of family and life. A brilliant and unforgettable story.
May 7, 2021
Imagine the heartbreak, the pain, the dislocation. Nine-year-old twins, Jon and Eden Hardacre are orphaned in a terrible car accident in which they are both injured. Jon tells us their story as they grow up with their step-grandma Bobbie, who is still grieving her own loss – the death of their grandfather. The boys compete with each other at swimming, fall in love with the same girl, and negotiate the shoals of life. The newly configured family moves between Bobbie’s farm at Flowerdale and the boy’s suburban home in Newport, Victoria. It is a challenging read, especially at the beginning because we are confined to Jon’s unfiltered nine-year-old view of what happens. Jon’s view gradually expands, and he (and we) appreciate that life is more complex, that relationships are not always straightforward.
I was drawn into this story, imagining a nine-year-old view of such a tragedy, and admiring the resilience of Jon, Eden, and Bobbie as they found a way ahead, through various challenges. If we live, we learn. Nothing stays the same. Life goes on.
Mr Mattinson brings his characters to life, especially Jon and Bobbie, and this is a story that will stay with me for a long time.
Jennifer Cameron-Smith
I was drawn into this story, imagining a nine-year-old view of such a tragedy, and admiring the resilience of Jon, Eden, and Bobbie as they found a way ahead, through various challenges. If we live, we learn. Nothing stays the same. Life goes on.
Mr Mattinson brings his characters to life, especially Jon and Bobbie, and this is a story that will stay with me for a long time.
Jennifer Cameron-Smith
May 14, 2021
It starts off through the eyes of 9yr old Jon Hardacre. Life for him and his twin brother Eden are packaged into a sunshine and honey jar - the pleasures of creeks and swimming, the love of Mum and Dad, the bliss of family and contentment of small joys of jelly beans, hot choc and Monte Carlo bikkies. A horrible accident shatters the family existence and the boys grow up without their parents. As they fill the vacuum they begin to compete with each in their passion for swimming and later in love they fall for the same girl. The complications of life will stretch them in ways they never imagined.
The beginning of the book you clearly hear the 9yr old voice, his words are few and staggered; breathing pain. You feel the fracture in the unspoken. 80 odd pages in, their energies have shifted. Pins rods and plates removed and there is a obvious different pace. This is what I like about the book, you can actually feel the rhythm of the spaces they are in. There is a deep and wide spectrum in character and colour. The tension of the bonds grip you and I found myself catching my breath and tears. I wanted to grab Bobbi - their grandmother and force her to hug the twins and I wanted to sit with her and twirl a glass of red.
As mentioned this book covers a few themes. It is rich in all these veins. Mattinson is detailed and deliberate. The way the afternoon light pours into the room, sometimes warm-yellow, other times artificial or sepia on the skin, always a soothing light. Flaws and ordinary on display but what you receive is the sublime. Powerful in its style and depth that it moves you to be intentional, to savour ordinary moments of life with loved ones. I am curious about what real honey tastes like, I am going to have a sip on a Pepperjack and rate it and as I close this review I am heading out to a outback gorge to dip my toes. This is what I great book does it moves you in more ways than one.
I was granted a uncorrected proof copy by Better Reading Australia. I was not required to provide a positive review. This unbiased review is my own personal opinion.
July 22, 2021
A beautiful book, full of heart, sadness and swimming.
July 27, 2021
A compelling and involving with characters that I began to feel very close to.
Some very real, but original takes on themes that are often explored but not in this way.
I truly hope this new Australian author writes another novel.
Some very real, but original takes on themes that are often explored but not in this way.
I truly hope this new Australian author writes another novel.
July 17, 2021
This began promisingly but ran out of steam at the half way point. I found the way the characters spoke, in these short, clipped sentences increasingly annoying as the book went on. Real people don't speak that way and it undermined the authenticity of the characters which made me less invested in the story. Not the book for me. 3 stars.
July 10, 2021
This is a beautiful book. I couldn’t put it down.
July 8, 2021
I totally enjoyed this fantastic new coming of age fiction. Twins brothers survive a horrible accident that kills there parents, changing the boys lives forever. This is a book filled with trauma, sadness and grief, a slow burn that will leave you an emotional wreck.
January 9, 2022
There are some great reviews of this book that expand on what I have to say far more eloquently, but let me be blunt.
Someone needs to take away Campbell Mattinson’s writing utensils until he learns how to:
A) write dialogue the way people (especially children) actually speak
B) create three-dimensional female characters (Carmelina is the worst thing about this novel)
C) construct consistent and flowing plot points rather than catapulting his reader through a mish mash of fragmented vignettes and drawn out action scenes
The most frustrating novel I’ve read in a long time.
Someone needs to take away Campbell Mattinson’s writing utensils until he learns how to:
A) write dialogue the way people (especially children) actually speak
B) create three-dimensional female characters (Carmelina is the worst thing about this novel)
C) construct consistent and flowing plot points rather than catapulting his reader through a mish mash of fragmented vignettes and drawn out action scenes
The most frustrating novel I’ve read in a long time.
August 31, 2021
Hands down the best book I've read in 2021.
This novel!!!! Wow. Just wow.
This novel!!!! Wow. Just wow.
May 1, 2022
I’m somewhat ambivalent regarding this book. There are intense moments in the narrative that the writer captures you with wonderful expression, and then there are moments when the book becomes quite pedestrian and loaded with well explored tropes.
This is another coming of age novel, of which there seems to be a slew being published at the moment. This novel also examines young male relationships and loves: this topic is well represented for female relationships, but we are still catching up when young male relationships are explored – one advocate has been Tim Winton. I'm honest when I say, I think he does it better.
Twin boys are in a horrific car accident that kills both parents and leaves the boys with emotional and physical scars. How the boys cope is well presented in the book and is one of its strengths. It is honest, brutal and deals honestly with male teen surliness and silent communications. It’s the silences and poor communications that of course mean poor and hurtful decisions are made that affect everyone, including the individual making them.
Mum had been a champion swimmer, and she had started the boys’ training. As both a homage to their dead mother, and as a form of release from the tragedy, they continue the training, with one overcoming severe physical injuries from the accident. The race scenes are wonderful, with a sports writer’s deft touch that are exciting to read and are evocative of the thrill of the race. The internal monologues of Jon as he swam was a nice touch here. The issue I had was that it immediately returned me to Tsiolkas’ Barracuda and I found myself comparing the two novels, which I found unfortunate. And yes, there are similarities.
The woman left to care for the orphan boys is the step-grandmother Bobbie. She is the eccentric Aussie character seen in all too many films, and although she is original in her quirkiness, it is still a tired trope that has outlived its life. Bobbie is a complex character in some ways, and is probably the best fleshed out in the novel. She is someone that has never desired children, and is grieving for the loss of her partner – the boys’ grandfather. Her awkwardness through the entire novel, her silent love in managing the boys, and her own emotional trauma, are presented in an honest way that is a strength to the novel. The side plot concerning the unrequited love of two hurting people Werner and Bobbie adds a nice dimension to the book.
Bobbie speaks in epigrams, which are both novel, fun, and could easily become annoying to the reader. My issue is the dialogue by the other characters. I support the surliness, truncated statements of the boys during their teens, but unfortunately, this extends to the adult characters in the novel, and I did grow to dread observing a page of dialogue.
The young love between Carmelina and both boys is also an honest portrayal of teen love, mistakes, angst, and indecision. Jon in particular makes some terrible mistakes by not reading the signs given off by Carmelina. Some thoughts of this plot line – was Carmelina sexually abused by her father? I rather think she was, based on some actions she tries to instigate later in the book. A left field one – is Jon gay? I started wondering if he was – there is some rather “odd” language and expressions used when he describes his brother’s physical fitness at his peak. I found it disconcerting coming from a “straight” teen – and there is the uncomfortable moments with Carmelina that Eden never experiences. These are just my musings as I read, and may not be the author’s intensions at all.
The other character is the location. Set in both Newport and Flowerdale, I felt the portrayal of Newport was refreshing from the media’s traditional expression of being a dirty, smelly, low socio-economic area. Mattinson shows the other side, as seen from an insider – an area that has strong community, of people growing their own food rather than buying everything, and the blending of a multicultural society that doesn’t obsess with the differences of culture, as is more common in the eastern suburbs. Inner city Melbourne is well represented by such authors as Helen Garner, and the traditional white collar suburbs situated in the east; I enjoyed the back drop of the West Gate Bridge, the Newport Power Station, and the Altona oil refinery.
The 1st person narrative has some limitations. Jon is really a cypher, which is natural when he is the narrator. For me, I also found Eden a bit two-dimensional. Now this could be either a stroke of genius by Mattison because Jon being a teen is not going to present us with rounded characters; or it could be the inexperience of a 1st novel, and means Mattison shall need to improve his writing style to overcome this deficiency. The fact that Bobbie is such a fleshed out, multi-faceted character, made me suspect the latter.
So, while I did enjoy the locations, the depiction of the emotional aspects of the twins and their development as young men – both internal relationships, and exploring external ones, and their emotionally broken step-grandmother, I grated my teeth through the dialogue, having another eccentric Aussie character, and the use of sport to learn life’s lessons. Will I recommend? Sort of; maybe.
This is another coming of age novel, of which there seems to be a slew being published at the moment. This novel also examines young male relationships and loves: this topic is well represented for female relationships, but we are still catching up when young male relationships are explored – one advocate has been Tim Winton. I'm honest when I say, I think he does it better.
Twin boys are in a horrific car accident that kills both parents and leaves the boys with emotional and physical scars. How the boys cope is well presented in the book and is one of its strengths. It is honest, brutal and deals honestly with male teen surliness and silent communications. It’s the silences and poor communications that of course mean poor and hurtful decisions are made that affect everyone, including the individual making them.
Mum had been a champion swimmer, and she had started the boys’ training. As both a homage to their dead mother, and as a form of release from the tragedy, they continue the training, with one overcoming severe physical injuries from the accident. The race scenes are wonderful, with a sports writer’s deft touch that are exciting to read and are evocative of the thrill of the race. The internal monologues of Jon as he swam was a nice touch here. The issue I had was that it immediately returned me to Tsiolkas’ Barracuda and I found myself comparing the two novels, which I found unfortunate. And yes, there are similarities.
The woman left to care for the orphan boys is the step-grandmother Bobbie. She is the eccentric Aussie character seen in all too many films, and although she is original in her quirkiness, it is still a tired trope that has outlived its life. Bobbie is a complex character in some ways, and is probably the best fleshed out in the novel. She is someone that has never desired children, and is grieving for the loss of her partner – the boys’ grandfather. Her awkwardness through the entire novel, her silent love in managing the boys, and her own emotional trauma, are presented in an honest way that is a strength to the novel. The side plot concerning the unrequited love of two hurting people Werner and Bobbie adds a nice dimension to the book.
Bobbie speaks in epigrams, which are both novel, fun, and could easily become annoying to the reader. My issue is the dialogue by the other characters. I support the surliness, truncated statements of the boys during their teens, but unfortunately, this extends to the adult characters in the novel, and I did grow to dread observing a page of dialogue.
The young love between Carmelina and both boys is also an honest portrayal of teen love, mistakes, angst, and indecision. Jon in particular makes some terrible mistakes by not reading the signs given off by Carmelina. Some thoughts of this plot line – was Carmelina sexually abused by her father? I rather think she was, based on some actions she tries to instigate later in the book. A left field one – is Jon gay? I started wondering if he was – there is some rather “odd” language and expressions used when he describes his brother’s physical fitness at his peak. I found it disconcerting coming from a “straight” teen – and there is the uncomfortable moments with Carmelina that Eden never experiences. These are just my musings as I read, and may not be the author’s intensions at all.
The other character is the location. Set in both Newport and Flowerdale, I felt the portrayal of Newport was refreshing from the media’s traditional expression of being a dirty, smelly, low socio-economic area. Mattinson shows the other side, as seen from an insider – an area that has strong community, of people growing their own food rather than buying everything, and the blending of a multicultural society that doesn’t obsess with the differences of culture, as is more common in the eastern suburbs. Inner city Melbourne is well represented by such authors as Helen Garner, and the traditional white collar suburbs situated in the east; I enjoyed the back drop of the West Gate Bridge, the Newport Power Station, and the Altona oil refinery.
The 1st person narrative has some limitations. Jon is really a cypher, which is natural when he is the narrator. For me, I also found Eden a bit two-dimensional. Now this could be either a stroke of genius by Mattison because Jon being a teen is not going to present us with rounded characters; or it could be the inexperience of a 1st novel, and means Mattison shall need to improve his writing style to overcome this deficiency. The fact that Bobbie is such a fleshed out, multi-faceted character, made me suspect the latter.
So, while I did enjoy the locations, the depiction of the emotional aspects of the twins and their development as young men – both internal relationships, and exploring external ones, and their emotionally broken step-grandmother, I grated my teeth through the dialogue, having another eccentric Aussie character, and the use of sport to learn life’s lessons. Will I recommend? Sort of; maybe.
October 2, 2021
The writing was mesmerising. The voice of Jon rang through so well. The loss and the challenge of grief and family was well told. Connection between twins Jon and Eden was deep and insightful.
The swimming was a huge part of this story, and at times, I found the relentless accounts of training and races to be boring. But I am not a swimmer, so maybe that tainted my view. I guess that training to be an Olympic swimmer would be relentless and repetitive, so that part of this book was spot on.
I would have to say that my favourite character was Bobbie. She was complicated and thrown in at the deep end to look after these two boys in her mid/late years. With no blood tie to them, she struggles to be the emotional support she needs to be.
There were a couple of unanswered questions, but overall it was an emotional and well constructed read.
The swimming was a huge part of this story, and at times, I found the relentless accounts of training and races to be boring. But I am not a swimmer, so maybe that tainted my view. I guess that training to be an Olympic swimmer would be relentless and repetitive, so that part of this book was spot on.
I would have to say that my favourite character was Bobbie. She was complicated and thrown in at the deep end to look after these two boys in her mid/late years. With no blood tie to them, she struggles to be the emotional support she needs to be.
There were a couple of unanswered questions, but overall it was an emotional and well constructed read.
September 8, 2021
Thanks to Netgalley for a copy of this book for an honest review.
This story starts with a tragic accident that changes the lives of twins Jon and Eden. The writing style is annoying and I just didn't like it. The boys step-grandmother Bobbie had lots of platitudes but little substance. The treatment of Hemi lost me completely!
This story starts with a tragic accident that changes the lives of twins Jon and Eden. The writing style is annoying and I just didn't like it. The boys step-grandmother Bobbie had lots of platitudes but little substance. The treatment of Hemi lost me completely!
July 3, 2022
Can you think of a sports novel that doesn’t take on the qualities of the sport which is its heartfelt object? Can you think of a sport which would not make an effective allegory? A good sports novel’s aesthetic fidelity to the form of that unity of muscular strategies which it loves distinguishes it from every novel written about every other sport. In that sense, the genre ‘sports novel’ names only a slim abstraction, a set of texts that might have very little in common, just as the genre romance proceeds according to a logic fundamentally different from the detective thriller’s, even as this pre-figured logic is in tension with the unique and contingent drama of every love, or every crime – and every sport. These genres are real abstractions, problems of form which are systematically muscular in their own way. (Just as novel-writing has its sporting moments). We could put the work in to illuminate one magically realist baseball triumph by, say, the light of some modernist coming of age that takes place over the chessboard. This would at least be more interesting than seeing that a novel is about young white Australian brothers and putting some combination of the words “Tim Winton Trent Dalton Christos Tsiolkas Richard Flanagan” in your opening paragraphs.
Detailed plot discussion follows + content warning for description of graphic inciting scene.
We Were Not Men has a headlong and immersive quality. It swims. “It felt as though we cut a groove, all of us, as if we were a river, rolling” (215). It is, specifically, a single movement that almost never marks its temporal breaks. On page 53, two apparently section-breaking asterisks enclose the line “I did not know. I was spinning,” which directly follows and is followed by the conversation in which what it describes takes place. Cuts and skips are occluded and only these continuities come into relief. The first-person perspective proceeds with unwavering directness to its own coming of age. Everything flows in this novel: wine, honey, water, and blood. “I wanted to sink my hands into its water and pour its heat all over me like the liquid everything of my mother’s arms, if only I could” (73). The narrator has a particular symptomatic inclination, a bend to their being and a logic to their desire, that drives them to water, and that pulls the text together into a repertoire of images aligned by their fluidity, by their sweet stickiness or their ripe vintage.
Sport being in general one of those enduringly grand human allegories and structures of striving, it calls out the meanings of coming of age. That’s something that Campbell Mattinson seems to teach us here. I can make the critical claim that our novel is like its sport of choice, that the form in question allegorises one species of physique in motion. But Jon lives this allegory in the other direction – which makes sense, because he is a swimmer and not a novel-writer. Every race, for Jon, is an epic, a family drama, every turn a volta, every lane a line. His own story is at stake in the rankings, his father’s name surrounds the scoreboard, and his mother’s name inscribes it, becomes real history, the history of his sport and his family. “We looked like two ordinary boys poolside, swinging our arms, feet jostling on the spot, ankles loose. But we were not. We were pent up with story” (102). The energy, even the libido, that drives him through the water is a commitment to narrative. His sentences hold his breath. “We grew in size and stature but mostly we grew in style, in that we developed one” (142). Throughout the novel, mysterious letters appear that narrate the real history of the great Olympians, unaddressed literary guidance and inspiration to our two sport-protagonists, and a becoming-textual of the mythologies that animate conversations and whispers. The final letter records (reminding us of one of the great sport tropes) an underdog’s surprise victory, but with an equally sympathetic, wisely detached rendition of the previous world-record-holder’s inner turmoil – a dialectic that Jon and Eden play out on the level both of their sport and of their romance of Carmelina; this novel overcomes in its own way one of the essential formal paradoxes posed by most sports, the tragedy of the zero-sum game, the loss that cannot be recovered, the cruel ideology of the unredistributive profit economy – “Suddenly, in an underwater blink, ten metres into the final lap, the reigning six-year-undefeated-world-record champion [Susie O’Neill] had been handed a script to a completely different play” (276). Swimming is a kind of writing.
There are baseball moments in WWNM, too, dwelling on the subtle incompatibility of that sport with cricket, the hand turned up rather than away, spin or foul. An idea launched high into the air and another world is possible. That feeling is just a glimpse for this novel, refreshing Jon’s commitment to his wavering narrative. Boxing, similarly, is only one component of their intense training regimen, but in the end it serves as the climactic private dialogue of Jon and his substitute father-grandfather, Werner, who is utterly impenetrable and yet breaks himself in love of Bobbie, and who is ripped down the middle of his trunk: “That dark straight scar running down his chest looked like a swimming lane. I should have stepped forward then but I held off because I couldn’t stop looking at his scar. I wondered how long ago it had happened. I couldn’t remember anything really about my dad’s body” (315). His body disciplines Jon’s, almost wordlessly, one body writing directly upon another a supplement to a missing legacy. The stripped-down rhetoric of truth without judgement sounds like the trainer by the riverbank or the coach in the ring, telling you that you can and must “control it,” that you can punch from your legs, that “swimming is a boulevard of broken teenagers” (314–315). Sports themselves collide as viewpoints on truths and histories, and Jon lines up their stories until he knows how to begin.
Mattinson’s form is nothing like, say, Infinite Jest, a more-than-sports-novel to which it is always tricky and revealing to be compared. In tennis, two entities grapple at a distance; their drive to physical combat is rendered intellectual, displaced and deferred, cancelled but preserved, translated into geometry’s reluctant collaboration, a smackdown that is now a velocity, a kiss that is now an arc. David Foster Wallace anxiously loves the body that disappears into thinking. The constant breaks and jolts of that novel are totally foreign to WWNM. But their contrasting content is sports-mediated into a shared story: the boy can’t speak. “It’s like you’re broken in some way. I don’t know. Every time I look at you I feel as though you’re about to burst” (278). We’re coming of age and all we have are our temporary bodies and our muscular languages. Jon is always looking for Eden in the water, and always looking back at himself after imagining himself in Eden’s lane.
All we have, also, are our mothers.
This is a rare moment in which that all-too-familiar abstraction of contemporary Australian fiction, masculinity, white manhood, is briefly proffered in its conceptual universality – here our story of two boys comes of age itself, comes to speak to all of us; this is what it takes to become a man – only to collapse into the sound of a quite different word. These two lines, perhaps, have something of DFW’s too-cleverness to them. It is not just an oddly direct Freudianism, a misrecognition of something not-quite-said which serves to remind us of the phonetic overlap between motherhood and masculinity internal to our language. Is there a man without a mom. It is, more than this, our narrator offering up this Freudianism to us in express interpretation. He thinks where his other is, he wonders what his mouth looks like in his brother’s eyes, since they’re both looking in the same direction, back in time, to the same car accident. He knows he sees his mother everywhere. It’s not ironic interpretation; it’s not the troubled detachment of the end of postmodernism. He is really thinking this. He makes unflinching eye contact with the word for mother.
There are many such moments for this narrator who has to make meaning, who always thinks in sentences. Jon and Carmelina are kissing at a party:
Familial love and intimate romance are boldly close-braided in this novel.
It’s hard to pull off this kind of narration of an intimate moment being overwhelmed by an incestuous banality. We are being presented with a narrator who is now quite difficult to relate to – how many sixteen-year-olds have 1) a Freudian internal monologue that is 2) not ironic or defensive – but, maybe, this is what happens to narrators whose parents die in horrific car accidents. Irony is far too cheap for them. The trauma that incites this novel’s story is, in the final analysis, continuously reflected in its sincere narrative manner (it ‘left a line there’). This passage of the kiss recalls explicitly the shocking beginning. I was thrown on the question of genre by the combination of this style with this content; there is an abject quiver that threatens the internal coherence of the story in its bleeding beginning. Jon’s mother is decapitated. To describe that kind of incident is to define the genre of what you are writing: the more you linger, the more horror your text will seem to call for. Push it into the background, making it the object of a euphemistic post hoc dialogue between adult characters, and maybe we have a serious but family-friendly drama. WWNM reads like this:
This is a serious liquid confusion, a strange moment of rich descriptive prose applied to an incident difficult to look at. The narrator cannot resist indulging in an odd little play on ‘being in a place’ and ‘being there for someone.’ At the end of the next paragraph, “it was as if we were still in the womb,” Jon desperately holding onto Eden as he seizes (15). This moment of trauma immediately sets off the interpretative recovery that the narrator has to engage in symptomatically, as if it were a defence mechanism against the absolute severance he just witnessed inside his own story. He has to be able to swim, because his mother was a swimmer, and because in swimming you can continue to flow, and swimming has to continue to mean something.
It is a novel of recovery through obsessional meaning-making, the story of swimming to keep up with signification. But there are some few grateful moments of readjustment and transformation. Carmelina, the object of desire, the teenager whom Jon constantly mistakes for his own mother, is largely in the background of this novel; her discourse shrinks and struggles inside Jon’s narrative 1500m. This has been noted as a weakness of this very boy-heavy text. But we can plot the outline of an essential tension in Carmelina’s key moments. One thing she does do is change her own name as she comes of age:
Again, a misrecognition, a momentary failure of sound and speech. Jon hears and mishears her new name. It’s Carm taking on the signifiers of her own life and trying to make them sensible to Jon, trying to get his narrative to flow alongside hers, to notice what is happening outside of its own destination. And Jon isn’t very good at that:
This is an important and marked resistance. Eden does the right thing: he respects the logic and the desire of Carm’s discourse. Jon does not: he relents momentarily only because Eden does, an odd elevation of his masculine mirror. He even possibly indulges in bad wordplay that calls back to his initial misrecognition: “keep Carm” as in, he did not keep calm. In these moments of ethical failure, the novel itself reveals the limitations of its otherwise all-encompassing narrator. In the end, the coming of age under discussion cannot easily accomplish a mature love bond, because this has been the story of the limits of its single-minded deployment of its private and stricken language. The most powerful and grandly suspenseful version of this particular revelation is the final reconciliation of Jon and Eden with Bobbie, in which they replay, in the non-competitive, thus concrete actualisation of the physical reality of sport’s truths and motions – “The Olympics was a dream but this current was real” (335) – the history of their own mother’s heroic moment of ethical success through commitment to a form: saving someone from drowning. The success of this novel is always told in the domain of its formal essence, its sport of choice. You have to come of age before you can love somebody properly. You have to know how to play your sport. You have to know your body. “As I swam I started rewriting things in my head, rewriting Bobbie, rewriting love” (335). You have to rewrite swimming if you want to rewrite your life.
Detailed plot discussion follows + content warning for description of graphic inciting scene.
We Were Not Men has a headlong and immersive quality. It swims. “It felt as though we cut a groove, all of us, as if we were a river, rolling” (215). It is, specifically, a single movement that almost never marks its temporal breaks. On page 53, two apparently section-breaking asterisks enclose the line “I did not know. I was spinning,” which directly follows and is followed by the conversation in which what it describes takes place. Cuts and skips are occluded and only these continuities come into relief. The first-person perspective proceeds with unwavering directness to its own coming of age. Everything flows in this novel: wine, honey, water, and blood. “I wanted to sink my hands into its water and pour its heat all over me like the liquid everything of my mother’s arms, if only I could” (73). The narrator has a particular symptomatic inclination, a bend to their being and a logic to their desire, that drives them to water, and that pulls the text together into a repertoire of images aligned by their fluidity, by their sweet stickiness or their ripe vintage.
Sport being in general one of those enduringly grand human allegories and structures of striving, it calls out the meanings of coming of age. That’s something that Campbell Mattinson seems to teach us here. I can make the critical claim that our novel is like its sport of choice, that the form in question allegorises one species of physique in motion. But Jon lives this allegory in the other direction – which makes sense, because he is a swimmer and not a novel-writer. Every race, for Jon, is an epic, a family drama, every turn a volta, every lane a line. His own story is at stake in the rankings, his father’s name surrounds the scoreboard, and his mother’s name inscribes it, becomes real history, the history of his sport and his family. “We looked like two ordinary boys poolside, swinging our arms, feet jostling on the spot, ankles loose. But we were not. We were pent up with story” (102). The energy, even the libido, that drives him through the water is a commitment to narrative. His sentences hold his breath. “We grew in size and stature but mostly we grew in style, in that we developed one” (142). Throughout the novel, mysterious letters appear that narrate the real history of the great Olympians, unaddressed literary guidance and inspiration to our two sport-protagonists, and a becoming-textual of the mythologies that animate conversations and whispers. The final letter records (reminding us of one of the great sport tropes) an underdog’s surprise victory, but with an equally sympathetic, wisely detached rendition of the previous world-record-holder’s inner turmoil – a dialectic that Jon and Eden play out on the level both of their sport and of their romance of Carmelina; this novel overcomes in its own way one of the essential formal paradoxes posed by most sports, the tragedy of the zero-sum game, the loss that cannot be recovered, the cruel ideology of the unredistributive profit economy – “Suddenly, in an underwater blink, ten metres into the final lap, the reigning six-year-undefeated-world-record champion [Susie O’Neill] had been handed a script to a completely different play” (276). Swimming is a kind of writing.
There are baseball moments in WWNM, too, dwelling on the subtle incompatibility of that sport with cricket, the hand turned up rather than away, spin or foul. An idea launched high into the air and another world is possible. That feeling is just a glimpse for this novel, refreshing Jon’s commitment to his wavering narrative. Boxing, similarly, is only one component of their intense training regimen, but in the end it serves as the climactic private dialogue of Jon and his substitute father-grandfather, Werner, who is utterly impenetrable and yet breaks himself in love of Bobbie, and who is ripped down the middle of his trunk: “That dark straight scar running down his chest looked like a swimming lane. I should have stepped forward then but I held off because I couldn’t stop looking at his scar. I wondered how long ago it had happened. I couldn’t remember anything really about my dad’s body” (315). His body disciplines Jon’s, almost wordlessly, one body writing directly upon another a supplement to a missing legacy. The stripped-down rhetoric of truth without judgement sounds like the trainer by the riverbank or the coach in the ring, telling you that you can and must “control it,” that you can punch from your legs, that “swimming is a boulevard of broken teenagers” (314–315). Sports themselves collide as viewpoints on truths and histories, and Jon lines up their stories until he knows how to begin.
Mattinson’s form is nothing like, say, Infinite Jest, a more-than-sports-novel to which it is always tricky and revealing to be compared. In tennis, two entities grapple at a distance; their drive to physical combat is rendered intellectual, displaced and deferred, cancelled but preserved, translated into geometry’s reluctant collaboration, a smackdown that is now a velocity, a kiss that is now an arc. David Foster Wallace anxiously loves the body that disappears into thinking. The constant breaks and jolts of that novel are totally foreign to WWNM. But their contrasting content is sports-mediated into a shared story: the boy can’t speak. “It’s like you’re broken in some way. I don’t know. Every time I look at you I feel as though you’re about to burst” (278). We’re coming of age and all we have are our temporary bodies and our muscular languages. Jon is always looking for Eden in the water, and always looking back at himself after imagining himself in Eden’s lane.
All we have, also, are our mothers.
I stood then and he looked up to the stands and when he found me I mouthed a word to him. From a distance it might have looked as though I had said the word Mum but what I had said was ‘Man’ because I thought then that he was sixteen, nearly seventeen, and that he had in that swim become one. (302)
This is a rare moment in which that all-too-familiar abstraction of contemporary Australian fiction, masculinity, white manhood, is briefly proffered in its conceptual universality – here our story of two boys comes of age itself, comes to speak to all of us; this is what it takes to become a man – only to collapse into the sound of a quite different word. These two lines, perhaps, have something of DFW’s too-cleverness to them. It is not just an oddly direct Freudianism, a misrecognition of something not-quite-said which serves to remind us of the phonetic overlap between motherhood and masculinity internal to our language. Is there a man without a mom. It is, more than this, our narrator offering up this Freudianism to us in express interpretation. He thinks where his other is, he wonders what his mouth looks like in his brother’s eyes, since they’re both looking in the same direction, back in time, to the same car accident. He knows he sees his mother everywhere. It’s not ironic interpretation; it’s not the troubled detachment of the end of postmodernism. He is really thinking this. He makes unflinching eye contact with the word for mother.
There are many such moments for this narrator who has to make meaning, who always thinks in sentences. Jon and Carmelina are kissing at a party:
I began to concentrate on the feeling of her forehead against mine. I couldn’t help it. I thought of Mum and how her forehead kissed mine as it flew past and had left a line there. This thought did not kill the moment because the moment was too great but it meant that this was the extent of it. (266–267)
Familial love and intimate romance are boldly close-braided in this novel.
I could see the whiteness of her scalp at close range. For a fraction of a second I thought of my mother’s head and more specifically of my mother’s hair; sometimes when Eden and I were small we’d play with it as she talked on the phone. (160)
It’s hard to pull off this kind of narration of an intimate moment being overwhelmed by an incestuous banality. We are being presented with a narrator who is now quite difficult to relate to – how many sixteen-year-olds have 1) a Freudian internal monologue that is 2) not ironic or defensive – but, maybe, this is what happens to narrators whose parents die in horrific car accidents. Irony is far too cheap for them. The trauma that incites this novel’s story is, in the final analysis, continuously reflected in its sincere narrative manner (it ‘left a line there’). This passage of the kiss recalls explicitly the shocking beginning. I was thrown on the question of genre by the combination of this style with this content; there is an abject quiver that threatens the internal coherence of the story in its bleeding beginning. Jon’s mother is decapitated. To describe that kind of incident is to define the genre of what you are writing: the more you linger, the more horror your text will seem to call for. Push it into the background, making it the object of a euphemistic post hoc dialogue between adult characters, and maybe we have a serious but family-friendly drama. WWNM reads like this:
The curve of her body had that look to it, that bending down to get something look, because she had been decapitated, because our mum was in two places and neither of them was where we needed her to be.
Light. Orange light. It swirled from a van or truck.
My own head bruised and bleeding, a gash between my eyes. Mum’s head had kissed or smashed into my forehead as it had shot past. There was hot blood in my lap. It streamed from my face, my chest. It was mine, it was Eden’s, it was Mum’s. (15)
This is a serious liquid confusion, a strange moment of rich descriptive prose applied to an incident difficult to look at. The narrator cannot resist indulging in an odd little play on ‘being in a place’ and ‘being there for someone.’ At the end of the next paragraph, “it was as if we were still in the womb,” Jon desperately holding onto Eden as he seizes (15). This moment of trauma immediately sets off the interpretative recovery that the narrator has to engage in symptomatically, as if it were a defence mechanism against the absolute severance he just witnessed inside his own story. He has to be able to swim, because his mother was a swimmer, and because in swimming you can continue to flow, and swimming has to continue to mean something.
It is a novel of recovery through obsessional meaning-making, the story of swimming to keep up with signification. But there are some few grateful moments of readjustment and transformation. Carmelina, the object of desire, the teenager whom Jon constantly mistakes for his own mother, is largely in the background of this novel; her discourse shrinks and struggles inside Jon’s narrative 1500m. This has been noted as a weakness of this very boy-heavy text. But we can plot the outline of an essential tension in Carmelina’s key moments. One thing she does do is change her own name as she comes of age:
She said, ‘Carm.’
‘Calm?’
‘I call myself Carm now.’
‘Instead of Carmelina?’
‘I needed to change,’ she said. (254)
Again, a misrecognition, a momentary failure of sound and speech. Jon hears and mishears her new name. It’s Carm taking on the signifiers of her own life and trying to make them sensible to Jon, trying to get his narrative to flow alongside hers, to notice what is happening outside of its own destination. And Jon isn’t very good at that:
‘Are you finished with Carm?’
‘Finished?’ I said.
‘Has it ended with Carm?’ he said.
‘I didn’t keep Carm,’ I said. I only used that name for her because he had. (301)
This is an important and marked resistance. Eden does the right thing: he respects the logic and the desire of Carm’s discourse. Jon does not: he relents momentarily only because Eden does, an odd elevation of his masculine mirror. He even possibly indulges in bad wordplay that calls back to his initial misrecognition: “keep Carm” as in, he did not keep calm. In these moments of ethical failure, the novel itself reveals the limitations of its otherwise all-encompassing narrator. In the end, the coming of age under discussion cannot easily accomplish a mature love bond, because this has been the story of the limits of its single-minded deployment of its private and stricken language. The most powerful and grandly suspenseful version of this particular revelation is the final reconciliation of Jon and Eden with Bobbie, in which they replay, in the non-competitive, thus concrete actualisation of the physical reality of sport’s truths and motions – “The Olympics was a dream but this current was real” (335) – the history of their own mother’s heroic moment of ethical success through commitment to a form: saving someone from drowning. The success of this novel is always told in the domain of its formal essence, its sport of choice. You have to come of age before you can love somebody properly. You have to know how to play your sport. You have to know your body. “As I swam I started rewriting things in my head, rewriting Bobbie, rewriting love” (335). You have to rewrite swimming if you want to rewrite your life.
August 18, 2021
This is probably my book of the year. I swam every lap, felt every unshed tear (although I shed a few myself), rode every moment of love and heartbreak, and can’t bear to move it to my ‘read’ pile. I will remember Jon and Eden and Bobbie for a long time. Thank you, Campbell Mattinson, for persevering, it is a fine book and your parents would be very proud.
November 2, 2021
An amazing read. A family's struggle with grief, pain and anguish beautifully crafted by a master storyteller. Nine year old twin boys Jon and Eden are travelling home from their grandmother's home in country Victoria when they are involved in a horrific accident and their parents are killed. Their grandma is also suffering with the recent loss of her husband. The dialogue between the three central characters is in short, sharp sentences, each person protecting themselves from further pain. This book IS destined to be an Australian classic.
December 5, 2022
We Were Not Men by Campbell Mattinson was a book I’ve had sitting here for months after hearing a recommendation on a podcast. I decided to give it a go on audio.
The book is about nine year old twins Jon and Eden Hardacre who after a terrible accident end up living with their step-grandmother Bobbie (who hasn’t looked after kids before). On weekends they live at her farm in Flowerdale and during the week they are back at their original home in Newport to go to school. The twins both find a love of swimming to help them cope and we follow along until they are around seventeen and potentially in contention to swim at the Olympics. The novel is narrated from Jon’s POV and we see him fall in love with a girl in his year 6 class who then moves to another school. They reconnect later on with disastrous consequences.
Friends this was not a great book. Honestly I did not enjoy it at all and I really should have DNF’d it. I don’t think it was the audio that was the issue I think it was just really bad writing. The sentences were flowery, overly descriptive and there was an obscene overuse of similes. Exhibit A: “The car windows were eternally dark like Nescafe coffee.” I could go on . . .
I could not believe that any boy whether aged nine or sixteen would think and speak in the overwrought way that Jon did. The adults around the twins also spoke in clichés and half sentences which half the time made no sense! I found it excruciating to get through. This was sadly a book that definitely did not work for me.
The book is about nine year old twins Jon and Eden Hardacre who after a terrible accident end up living with their step-grandmother Bobbie (who hasn’t looked after kids before). On weekends they live at her farm in Flowerdale and during the week they are back at their original home in Newport to go to school. The twins both find a love of swimming to help them cope and we follow along until they are around seventeen and potentially in contention to swim at the Olympics. The novel is narrated from Jon’s POV and we see him fall in love with a girl in his year 6 class who then moves to another school. They reconnect later on with disastrous consequences.
Friends this was not a great book. Honestly I did not enjoy it at all and I really should have DNF’d it. I don’t think it was the audio that was the issue I think it was just really bad writing. The sentences were flowery, overly descriptive and there was an obscene overuse of similes. Exhibit A: “The car windows were eternally dark like Nescafe coffee.” I could go on . . .
I could not believe that any boy whether aged nine or sixteen would think and speak in the overwrought way that Jon did. The adults around the twins also spoke in clichés and half sentences which half the time made no sense! I found it excruciating to get through. This was sadly a book that definitely did not work for me.
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