Let the Boys Play: Nicholas John Turner’s vision through a glory hole is a masterpiece of defamiliarisation
What follows is not a conventional review of Let the Boys Play, by Nicholas John Turner — or certainly not the kind of review intended to be read by a prospective reader. If you have not already read Let the Boys Play, but are thinking of doing so, I would strongly suggest you come back here after you have read the book. With any luck, you’ll turn out to be a far more intelligent reader than I evidently am right from your first encounter with this novel. If that is so, you may not ever need to come back here at all…
When I first finished reading Let the Boys Play, my senses were left reeling. I could tell the author was a person of high intelligence, possessed of a wry sense of humour, and I could see his narration was filled with the most startling and original similes. He had an extraordinary way of manipulating time, too, so that in scene after scene I felt I was left stuck, as it were, swimming in treacle. The exceedingly weird story possessed an undeniable narrative drive. I was impressed, too, at how the author seemed often to have submitted his material to a kind of double transmutation, as if scenes had first been translated into the kind of representation one might see in a graphic novel, then re-translated back into words. He had created a vivid and startling world. Yet, for all that, I also felt deeply besmirched, outraged, even violated. Something truly vile, I felt, had just been “done to me”. It didn’t much help my mood to be forced to recognise that I myself had been actively complicit in this “doing” by reading the work in the first place.
I doubt I will be the only reader whose initial reaction to Let the Boys Play will have been one of shock. The novel’s preface warns that “Readers who are alarmed by sexual violence, in particular, and violence, generally, should expect to be challenged by this book”, and asks the reader “carefully (to) consider your willingness to grant the author this privilege.”
This warning is well-placed. The novel contains multiple references to non-consensual sex. In one horrific sequence, a police officer peers through a glory hole in the apartment wall of a murdered prostitute and sees, in the dark on the other side, a blood-smeared rat slink out of the dead woman’s mouth. Major characters are so addicted to drugs they are unable to distinguish fact from fantasy. Some bear signs of gross physical mutilation or deformity. I doubt I have ever read a book with so many detailed descriptions of penises. For myself, I must admit that the urge to put this book aside once I had finished reading it and never to think about it again was pretty strong.
Quite why, I don’t know, but for some reason, in thinking (somewhat reluctantly) about the novel, I was moved to consult Wikipedia’s article about Antonin Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty. Here, I came upon a description of an art form that confronts us with “the unrelenting agitation of a life that has become unnecessary, lazy, or removed from a compelling force” and which “gives expression to everything that is ‘crime, love, war, or madness’ in order to ‘unforgettably root within us the ideas of perpetual conflict, a spasm in which life is continually lacerated, in which everything in creation rises up and asserts itself against our appointed rank.’” (Gorelick, Nathan (2011). “Life in Excess: Insurrection and Expenditure in Antonin Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty”. Discourse. 33 (2): 263, cited at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theatre_of_Cruelty, accessed 8 May 2025)
Might this passage, I wondered, also serve as a description of Let the Boys Play? Was this novel an instance of a Literature of Cruelty, fashioned to break through all that may have become “lazy” in a reader like me, to root within a reader like me an altogether new conception of “life”?
Ordinarily, at this point, I would have started looking for reviews of the novel I had just read, which I had taken up, in the first place, solely on a recommendation from Martin Shaw on X, but without knowing anything else about the book. Something, though, held me back. I was intrigued that Turner had cited, in his Acknowledgements, a work by Michelle Boulous Walker titled Slow Philosophy: Reading Against The Institution. I had noticed, in reading the novel, recurrent references to “philosophy” and its cognates in contexts that seemed really odd: “it was cold and kind of philosophically dark” (p. 34), for instance, or “the hard place of his philosophical hunger” (p. 40). Was Turner throwing out a hint that he wanted me to read his novel more slowly — and more “philosophically”, whatever that might mean for a philistine like me?
So, instead of looking up reviews, I decided to let the novel sit with me a few days. It was not long before my patience won me a small reward. That tall man who features in the opening section, crammed into the little hatchback — is his position not described in terms that suggest the position of a foetus crammed tight inside a womb immediately before birth?
I decided to take a closer look. And very soon I realised I might be onto something.
The car the tall man occupies is described throughout the novel as a “hatchback”. Does that not, in itself, bring to mind some kind of birthing process? The ambient temperature at the opening scene is “38 degrees Celsius” (p. 12), more or less body temperature. Among others present at the opening scene are two female onlookers, each with one hand on “a tired-looking pram that conveyed a puffy, pale-orange toddler” (p. 21). Within the hatchback there is “someone large and apparently sleeping” (p. 25), and the position of this figure is described very much in terms that suggest the positioning of a foetus tightly crammed inside a womb.
The tall man’s knees splay around the steering wheel. His right leg reaches well up into the window pane and the other points toward the middle of the cabin … More curious still is the way the tall man’s head, folded back over the headrest, is turned aside and pressed so hard up against the roof that the peeling vinyl upholstery sags across his face like a warm towelette being lowered onto it (p. 17).
When the man slowly breathes and slightly swells he seems to even more accurately describe the dimensions and shape of the cabin by which he seems awkwardly formed like a spineless sea-thing to its obscure shell (p. 18)
Just as a foetus about to be born cannot stay forever engaged in the birth canal, this man, we are told, cannot stay where he is now. The car blocking the intersection has to be moved (p. 26). But “is there a safe way to remove him without cutting away some part of the seat or roof” (p. 18)?
Unless I imagining this, what we have here is description of a man, possibly representing mankind itself, who has grown too large for the “blue hatchback”, which in turn possibly represents planet earth, seen as a kind of “womb”. When Richard Foley, at the conclusion of this section, notices “a very small child’s football boots where the tall man’s feet really ought to be” (p. 29), is it a stretch to suggest that this possibly a literal representation of the notion that mankind has “grown too big for its boots”?
I began to wonder what other parts of this novel, which I had initially read so naively, might also yield meanings I had missed at first. What about the very last section, dealing with the death of Rocky Morat’s mother? On my first reading, it had struck me as a very odd coda indeed, scarcely at all connected with the rest of the novel. When I looked again, however, I almost immediately began noticing clues I had previously overlooked.
Rocky Morat’s mother is in the life-sustaining process of preparing food for herself, her husband and their station workers, when she unwittingly causes a dangerous gas (carbon dioxide is a dangerous gas, right?) to be released in her kitchen (p. 391). As in the novel’s opening scene, we are told the temperature, and it’s pretty high — “a not untypical forty degrees Celsius” (p. 391). An allusion to global warming? Rocky Morat’s mother is clearly an intelligent person. She orders in “university-level textbooks on complex calculus” (p. 392) and enjoys solving puzzles like crosswords and Sudokus — but her puzzle-solving intelligence does not prevent her blowing herself up when she goes to light a cigarette (p. 391). Even then, however, her death is not immediate. As she gets up from the floor after the explosion, we learn that she looks from behind “like one of those seabirds that has been caught in an oil spill” — another reminder of global warming, and of ecological pollution, and a sad contrast to the opening image of section 2, when, in a passage that seems to evoke a time when the world was young, a pelican descends and hovers, a “long, pale streak of wonder” (pp. 29-30). As the novel closes, Rocky Morat’s father, coming upon his wife, fails to recognise that her unusual stillness actually signifies her death (p. 393) — the imputation being, presumably, that this is where mankind stands right now, effectively extinct, only we haven’t quite realised it.
If the bookends of this novel are images of stillborn mankind grown too big for its boots, and of mankind’s capacity for self-nurture virtually extinct, how, I wondered, was I to understand all the book’s other seemingly bizarre content —the deeply troubling scenes involving the dead prostitute, the implied violence that had left her “gutted” and “her significant openings made more significant” (p. 82), the lumbering and violently inclined L. Gato, all the business about the pea, and the referees, and Len Hansen’s bizarre clothing choices, not to mention the recurring references to missing body parts and functions, and to sex and drugs?
Realising I had only a dim sense of the novel’s overall shape and structure, I decided to read it again, this time creating an outline of its contents to help me see its structure more clearly, and to help me locate passages of interest for closer inspection. I’ve included that outline here.
In this course of this re-reading, I made many discoveries that were a surprise to me. While much of this novel — probably the greater part of it — still remains utterly baffling to me, I am now of the view that is only because I have failed to decode content that probably is decodable, at least in principle.
So what have I found?
Let’s start with something that may look, at first blush, rather trivial: the way characters are named. Even on my first reading, I was intrigued to see that almost every character introduced into the story seemed to be named using a first name, last name pattern. Richard Foley. Ron Tsolkas. Rudy Bickle. Melanie Hodge. Len Hansen. I was on the lookout for names that might signify some character trait (names like Mr Knightley, say, or Holly Golightly) but, with the exception of L. Gato (whom we shall get to) I did not notice any name that appeared to be working in this way. And then it occurred to me that this double name style just might be a version of the so-called “binomial nomenclature” widely used to name the species of all living things (think, for example, of Homo sapiens, Tyrannosaurus rex, Macropus giganteus).
Clever! I thought. I was already clear to me, on my first reading, that the novel was filled with striking biological similes. Ron Tsolkas looks “like a snake with something ambitiously substantial sitting in its belly” (p. 6). Rory DeWitt twists a pepper grinder “like an unfortunate duck’s stubborn neck” (p. 128). Len Hansen “peck(s) around in his mental debris with the calm discernment of a single ibis over a toppled rubbish bin” (p. 194). In all kinds of ways, I was beginning to understand, the novel was setting us up to view its action not sub specie aeternitatis (“under the aspect of eternity”), as Spinoza might have said, but rather sub specie biologiae (“under the aspect of biology”). And if that was the case, I realised, then probably Organico, the large organisation whose large buildings and personnel seem to play such a dominant role in the near future when this novel is set, was not to be read as some dystopian mega-government or bureaucracy, as I was first inclined to think, but rather, perhaps, as representing organic life itself.
Doh! Well, of course, stupid!
It now seems clear to me that several sections of the novel, at least, are depictions of the way life has developed on earth.
Section 2 (pp. 29-43), for example, seems pretty clearly to evoke what we sometimes speak of as “the dawn of life” on earth. The chapter’s action begins, literally, “just after dawn” (p. 30), and is set mostly on lowland sports fields adjacent to water, a landscape through which Len Hansen will soon move as if he is navigating “a complex and shallow archipelago” (p. 38). This is just the kind of setting in which sea creatures are thought first to have begun transitioning into become land-dwelling.
It has only just gone 7:00 AM when pre-pubescent players begin moving over a field, “one ball-wielding entity tracing a fine line for the unordered masses to crudely gouge, producing an image that gradually destroyed itself in its pursuit of complexity” (p. 32). This looks very much like a description of the phenomenon of “emergence”, whereby “a complex entity has properties or behaviours that its parts do not have on their own, and emerge only when they interact in a wider whole” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergence, accessed 10 May 2025). The statue of a boy “who could not have been more than three years old … sitting silently with studded headgear hanging from his neck” above a plaque that reads “THY SONS MAKE PILLAGE” (p. 41) might almost be a fossil of an early life-form on display in a museum, displayed above some commentary on what the “survival of the fittest” may have meant in practical terms.
Len Hansen is not himself a rugby player, and so he is not involved directly in any kind of pillaging, but like all other life forms, Len is keenly interested in getting himself a feed. He has “total faith that his natural habitat (will) inevitably carry him kindly” (p. 39). Out on the open playing field, Len is “as unnerved as a field mouse by a hawk’s circling shadow” (p. 39) and runs to the canteen where, oddly dressed as he is, and despite the long queues ahead of him, his “appearance … collapse(s) the supposed system like a dam wall” (p. 40) as attendants rush to supply him with food. Here, if I am reading this right, we have a neat conjoining of contemporary social comedy with, I am guessing, an observation on how the seemingly outlandish physical appearance of some forms of life may have boosted their chances of survival.
Also in this section we meet Len Hansen’s step-sister Jenny. Jenny is one of the few characters in the novel only to be referred to throughout by a single name (the others being the similarly named Lula and Luca). One of Jenny’s defining characteristics is a one-ness where one might expect a two-ness. She has only one natural leg, her second being a prosthetic. She has a husband, and so is technically part of a couple, but the two-ness of this couple is compromised: her husband, who is never named at all, is confined to a wheelchair, and, as we subsequently learn, their house is so arranged that he cannot physically reach her bedroom (p. 203).
There is something very odd and yet powerful about Jenny. Len sees his step-sister as “an ageless witch, pregnant with gnarly secrets” (p. 35), “incapable of collaborating with other bodies”. “Only by co-incidence” can she “share in the experience of sensuality” (p. 37). No-one left in Jenny’s wake, we are told, “had ever quite known why they were buying what she was selling” (p. 35). Jenny has “settled into the quiet upper folds of Organico” (p. 35).
Could Jenny, I wonder, be a slightly alternative way of sounding out the word “gene”? Is the characteristic of Jenny that I have called “one-ness where one might expect two-ness” an expression of the idea that lifeforms that reproduce sexually need genes from two parents, and cannot stand on a one genetic “leg”, as it were?
There may be some support for this reading in a passage beginning on p. 307 where Len recalls how Jenny, as a teenager, entered his room, removed his pyjamas, then returned “with a bundle of clothes that she variously dressed him in, and which turned out to have come from his mother’s wardrobe” before proceeding “to apply make-up to his face” (p. 307).
This sounds to me almost like a thought experiment in which Len is asking himself “what if my generic inheritance had more nearly matched that ‘in my mother’s wardrobe’ — that is to say, if I had had only X chromosomes, like her, and not the gene that triggered the development of my male characteristics? How might that eventuality have altered my appearance — indeed, my whole make-up?”
I could, of course, be quite wrong in this, as in many other speculations I am putting forward here — and this does, to some extent, raise the question of whether, or to what extent, a reader is entitled to demand of an author that he or she “play fair” by advancing only such riddles as the reader may reasonably be expected to solve. I’m not sure, though, that that’s is a particularly fertile line of enquiry to be pursuing, given that authors are going to write what authors are going to write, no matter what readers think about the matter. At the end of the day, it is up to us, as readers, to decide what kinds of writing we find interesting, and whether we’re up for the challenge of engaging with as many knots and tangles as we’re confronted with here.
Let me turn now to one of the most initially troubling parts of the novel, that where Rocky Morant recounts to Len Hansen the terrible fate of Lula. It seems to me that Rocky initially sets his story involving Lula in an environment associated with the gut, and with the kinds of microbial forms of life we might find in the gut. The men Rocky overhears in a diner “in the midst of unfortunate Asia” (p. 93) are eating something that smells, he says, like “the sickness of something” (p. 76). Lula herself lives in a neighbourhood Rocky describes as “the lower intestine of hell” (p. 77).
From the outset, Rocky’s story about Lula is decidedly fishy. Lula is described as a “hooker” (p. 77). The hairs on the corner of the mouth of one of the men Rocky overhears in the diner are “exactly like a catfish” (p. 76). It turns out later this character is in fact the policeman known as The Goldfish (p. 87). The detectives assigned to investigate Lula’s disappearance are named Hong and Ling. All these associations suggest to me, at least, that what we are being given here as the story of a “disappearance” is set back at a point in our evolutionary history when the most recently evolved forms of life were aqueatic creatures and/or gut microorganisms.
The terms in which Lula’s fate is presented to us are stomach-churning. Detective Hong peers through a glory hole in a blind boy’s apartment wall to see
the dead face of what must have been Lula just a few inches from the wall’s other side, her eyes rolled back and mouth wide open like she was getting ready to receive in it something that Hong was going to pass through the hole (pp. 80-81).
After that, “Lula’s mouth suddenly started to like take shape or something and out of it slunk this blood-smeared rat” (p. 80). Subsequently, we learn that Lula had been “gutted” (p. 82), “her significant openings made more significant” (p. 82). “There was no cutting or digging,” Rocky tells Len. “Only the intervention of blunt things under tectonically stubborn influence … (S)he’d been reformed, in a way, as water shapes a stone. As caves are made. So that a rat might enter her mouth and emerge between her legs” (p. 83).
Terms like “tectonically” and “as water shapes a stone” surely help us understand (well, at least partly) what is going on here. Rocky’s story of Lula’s disappearance, transmutation and death makes an altogether different kind of sense if we read it as an account of the way some life forms have died out in the course of evolution, while at the same time passing on some of their characteristics, in a significantly altered form to their descendants. I do wonder if what is being described here might be, say, the evolution of the alimentary system of land-dwelling creatures whose ancestors originally came from the sea — ancestors who, unlike their land-dwelling descendants, would never have been able to eat a rat and later have it emerge, through “significant openings made more significant” between their legs.
On this reading, the blind boy who is so very interested in what has been taking place on the far side of the wall separating himself from Lula might be a modern day palaeontologist, forced to “work blind” in his speculations about earlier forms of life because he gets only to the most tantalisingly partial glimpses of the remains of these forms of life from a fossil record discernible only, as it were, through a tiny aperture.
There’s pretty strong support for this reading in Rocky’s account of what he himself saw once he got into Lula’s unlit bedroom following her death:
I gradually started to recognise some kind of shape on the bed with its arms splayed wide and its head cocked way too far back and neck twisted awkwardly. In the darkness it kind of looked like a dead bird that had been eaten away by ants under its feathers (p. 90).
This looks to me very much like a description of a fossilised Archaeopteryx, that creature thought to have been evolutionarily a half-way step between a dinosaur and a bird — a creature, incidentally, which Wikipedia describes as “(s)imilar in size to a Eurasian magpie” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archaeopteryx, accessed 14 May 2025).
Most intriguingly, Rocky insists that the story of what has happened to Lula “is not some twisted local legend … This is, like, happening now” (p. 87). This is an explicit suggestion that the same evolutionary forces that have seen the extinction-cum-transmutation of specific life forms in the past is still at work today — and so, by implication perhaps, affecting mankind now.
“And this all makes perfect sense,” says Rocky. “because of the way the chatty one’s been running his mouth … because he’s the Big Shamouli around these parts. He’s The Goldfish. Are you following me? It’s all happening, now. The kid. Lula. The detectives. They’re all hanging around somewhere, waiting. And The Goldfish, who’s going to decide what’s happening next, he’s sitting one foot away from me with everyone’s fate in his goddamn soup” (p. 87).
The “chatty one”, who’s “going to decide what’s happening next”?
Given we’re just been told that evolution is an on-going process, happening right now, do these words ring any special bells?
Later in the novel we will learn that Glenda, the adoptive mother of the very tall man found dying in the blue hatchback, developed what her own adoptive parents regarded as a “forged intellect” (p. 345), “sourcing and reading texts that were well beyond her natural intellect”, until at last, right their “dissuadingly uninterested eyes, Glenda had adopted many of the ineffable nuances of a compelling and authoritative orator” (p. 346).
Am I deluded to think that these references to The Goldfish as “the chatty one” who is “going to decide what’s happening next”, and to Glenda as a “forged intellect” that appears to be a “compelling and authoritative orator” after “reading texts that were well beyond her natural intellect”, may be references to the sort of Artificial Intelligence we now see embodied (well, quasi-embodied, let us say) in ChatGPT and the like? If so, this novel seems clearly to be pointing to this development as an extension of the very same process that has already seen life evolve from slime to gut bacteria to creatures like ourselves. If dinosaurs could become birds, via Archaeopteryx, what might we yet become?
That The Goldfish may be subject to certain limitations is implicit, I dare say, in his very name, synonymous in our culture with a short attention span. His limited purview of events is illustrated by the way he surveys the contents of Lula’s darkened room using only “a tiny pin-light of a torch or sort of pointer” (p. 91), while his essential a-humanity becomes evident to Rocky as he is hiding in a wardrobe in Lula’s room and The Goldfish appears right in front of him on the other side of the louvres:
But for some reason, looking at him directly, looking right into his little black eyes, I got the feeling he couldn’t see me after all. Like there was a deadness there, just a pair of shiny black marbles, like I was looking at a doll’s face (p. 96).
If The Goldfish represents a narrow, and even perhaps an artificial, capability for “reasoning”, the novel appears to suggest this capability arrived on the evolutionary scene well before humans did. The Goldfish tells Rocky “both of us are mostly water. Within” (p. 110), but insists that he, The Goldfish, is far more familiar with the kind of violence that sees, say, “(a) baby, unable yet to walk … scored to death by the cigarette embers of its father” (p. 109) than Rocky can be because “(y)ou are not from here. Not the way I am. The nature of the violence here you cannot know … (W)e have gills and you do not. Do you understand this? I open my gills. I draw oxygen from this water” (p. 109).
Another also very troubling section of the novel is that which opens the third part and describes with the gestation and delivery “in the care of Organico” (p. 269) of Edward, the slowly developing child who will eventually grow outlandishly tall and find himself stuck, in fact dying, in the blue hatchback.
I still do not understand much of this sequence, but my sense is that it is probably an allegorical account of the harsh, punitive conditions under which life first evolved on earth, and that Edward’s unnamed “mother” is perhaps best read as a kind of Gaia-like figure, even if at times she seems more like a female Cronos, intent on destroying her own child.
The opening pages of the section contain hints that it was certain unique combinations of chemicals that helped to sustain early life. At the outset, we are told that Edward’s mother “required the perpetual psychochemical infrastructure of her dependency’s object” (p. 269) — perhaps a reference to the idea that abiogenesis implies the prior synthesis of certain key organic molecules. To sustain herself in the early days of her pregnancy, Edward’s mother collects traces of fumigation powder which she then places on strips of banana peel to grow a mould (p. 270) which, in turn, she puts in a kettle and boils, creating a by-product “that could certainly kill her if she confined herself with it” (p. 271).
I know little of a scientific kind about the genesis of life on earth, but this narrative does fit with my limited understanding that there were, early on, certain chemical processes set in train that resulted in dramatic, potentially life-stultifying, changes to the make-up of the earth’s atmosphere, and that early forms of life may have evolved in environments so harsh that it may have seemed these environments were giving life a hammering — just as Edward’s mother, “fatally poisoned”, took a hammer and used it “against herself and what was within her” (p. 272).
As for what follows in this section — a brilliant, fugue-like passage extending over two pages that gives us a sense of how the relentless experience of consciousness, and self-consciousness, might be a cause of existential fear for Edward’s mother (pp. 274-276); Edward’s mother’s virginal co-habitation with Luca, the “sweeper” who makes food for them by cutting up large fish, and whom Edward’s mother eventually murders (p. 276); a lengthy sequence describing the eventual rehabilitation of Edward’s mother as she discovers “a noise of purpose” and “food … inundated with flavour” (p. 281) — I must confess I do not really understand much of this at all.
If we turn now to the novel’s main “characters” (a term that feels slightly out of place in this context) one obvious question that arises is what, if anything, each of them represents.
Let’s start, as the novel does, with Richard Foley. We learn at the outset that Foley is a “double-o” (p. 7) or “field observance officer” (p. 19) who aspires to “the pathological anti-sociality of dispassionate obsession of a savant” (p. 20). His role is to attend incidents where some question of liability may be at sake, making audio recordings but saying “as little as possible in interviews for the sake of liability’s total establishment” (p. 25).
Foley’s partner, Melanie Hodge, finds him “inexhaustibly sincere, lacking the subtlety or self-awareness to be disingenous” (p. 64) but chides his refusal to disclose what had happened to him as a boy at boarding school “that had turned a big part of him to wood” (p. 243). After attending the incident involving the tall man in the blue hatchback, Foley has drawn, on a piece of paper, a sketch that is, he says, “evidence of an observation that (he) undertook personally” (p. 190). Apart from insisting that this information is confidential, Foley himself does nothing with this information, as it is not his role to do so. At one point, Len Hansen, referring to the blue hatchback incident, characterises Foley as “(a) kind of highly-trained master of non-interest in things” (p. 251).
There are certainly passages in the novel that seem to support a quite realistic reading of the often fraught psychodynamics of Richard Foley’s relationship with Melanie Hodge and of her frustrations with him, rather as if these two characters might be, in effect, the novel’s Adam and Eve. Against that, however, the novel does seem to be suggest that Richard Foley simply represents the psychological function of sensory observation under a model where this function is seen as divorced from functions of interpretation. Thus Foley produces a “sketch” of what has happened in the novel’s opening section — an overly tall man has been found squashed inside a blue hatchback, possibly dying, with tiny football boots where his feet ought to be — but he does not to reflect on what the implications of this discovery might be.
Richard Foley’s current partner Melanie Hodge is a competitive beast of a netballer, a hard trainer given to “wilfully self-flagellating” exercise (p. 117), to undertaking punishing runs, and to treating her body as “an elaborate tool … a tired old nag she (is) willing to whip to death” (p. 234). If Melanie represents any one psychological function in particular — and I’m not sure this novel really does work quite so simply — that function would probably be “will power”.
The novel tends to present Melanie Hodge sub specie biologiae than it does Richard Foley. The account of how Melanie’s previously successful netball team is defeated in the finals by an otherwise mediocre team that happens to have among its number two exceedingly tall “physical freaks” (p. 53) has stroing Darwinian overtones as Melanie finds herself “criss-crossed by the long shadows of the two West Indians like a beetle under dancing mantises” (p. 55), her “low centre of gravity and comparatively powerful thighs” no match for the “biblically efficient” (p. 56) shooting of the West Indians.
Later passages describing Melanie’s willingness as a teenage to endure “unwelcome sexual advances, many of which bore the essential characteristics of rape” (p. 385) and her subsequent “fixation for multi-partnered intercourse that drove her every Saturday into the various clubhouses of the local rugby competition” (p 386) appear more like the accounts of the behaviour of female creatures one might see on a David Attenborough documentary than like the probable actions of a real contemporary woman.
The unusually named L. Gato does not break the novel’s pattern of using biological binomial nomenclature for most of its characters. In L. Gato’s case, the genus name, as often in biological writings, has simply been abbreviated to a single letter, just as Acacia Floribunda, for example, might be abbreviated to A. Floribunda. In this case, one effect of the abbreviation is to create a homophone for that old, amphibian apex predator the alligator, like Archaeopteryx a key transitional figure in the long story of life, being half sea-dweller and half land-dweller. If the characters in this novel do represent psychological functions (or something like that), then L. Gato would appear to embody all those “primitive” capabilities within us that we associate with our “lizard brain” — that is to say, functions like feeding, mating, defense and engaging in fight or flight.
On one level, of course, we are to understand that L. Gato is a human being. However, accounts of his physical appearance, behaviour and manner of moving seem forever to be subverting his human-ness. Even the term “sweeper” initially used to describe him (p. 114) conjures up an image of an alligator’s way of moving. At their first encounter, L. Gato swells before Richard Foley “like a breaking wave” (p. 115), then, after injuring himself by breaking through Foley’s window, we are told, he “slumped down … lurched forward with a grunt … grunted again … and seemed momentarily to be dozing” (p. 116). After downing a glass of “orange sports drink” (Gatorade??), L. Gato “gasp(s) like something hauled up from the ocean bottom” (p. 117).
For much of the time, we are told, L. Gato plays the role of a force from the past that is now held in reserve. A former rugby player, he helped the Fairfield Mynahs win a premiership many years ago, exhibiting, in his playing style, “the apparent pain indifference required to spend a great deal of time at the uncomfortable bottom of lightless rucks, impenetrable to the gaze of a sole local referee” (p. 292-203). Now, however, weeks often pass without L. Gato saying a word at the rugby club bar he frequents. He is “a kind of conscience” presiding over the club (p. 296), but his menace these days, “is cultivated by reputation alone” (p. 297).
Brutish, crude and lumbering as L. Gato often appears to be, the novel nonetheless suggests that L. Gato and Foley may both wish, and at some level need, to collaborate on solving the issues that arise from the incident involving the tall man in the blue hatchback, but that an unbridgeable gap exists between the two that renders such collaboration difficult.
When L. Gato breaks through the window of Richard Foley’s apartment, it appears his sole goal is to find the piece of paper on which Foley has drawn a sketch of the tall man incident and to make, however clumsily, some addition to that sketch. Still bleeding from cuts from cuts he sustained while breaking through Foley’s window, L. Gato:
surveyed the sheet of paper now in his lap, rotating it vaguely under his downcast eyes, and then stabbing at it with his index finger … (A) daub of blood remained where his finger had left it, seeing which he continued to drag a thick smear towards the page’s centre (p. 116).
Later in the novel, we learn that on the day of the hatchback incident, L. Gato had been following the car’s last movements until Foley had “entered the whole scene like a finger in an eye-socket” (p. 193) — suggesting, perhaps, that for all his status as a field observance officer, there is something spectacularly blind or obtuse about Foley’s observations — and that, in Melanie Hodge’s view, at least, when L. Gato smeared his blood on Foley’s sketch he did so “with obvious deliberateness and specificity … and alluded thus to some sort of action or incident beyond the page’s geographical purview and preceding it temporally” (p. 192). It seems that if he could only speak at this moment, L. Gato’s message to Foley would be that if he wants to understand what’s happened to the tall man in the car, he needs to appreciate the whole evolutionary history of life on earth, and understand the often violent-seeming interplay of forces that have brought us to the present moment.
Not long before the novel’s conclusion, Melanie seeks out L. Gato in the clubhouse of the Fairfield Mynahs and pleads with him to come and see Foley, waiting in the car outside, because, she says, “if there’s something to know, he knows” (p. 360), although Foley himself won’t go “there”:
“He won’t go. Not for me. And not for himself. He would never go. Never. They say he can’t. He won’t” (p. 361).
L. Gato, however, refuses. Old lizard brain grasps, at least in some dumb, instinctual way, that mankind is facing a crisis, and has tried to point out as much. Man-the-observer has recorded the evidence, but remains woodenly uninvolved when it comes to acting on it in any way. And so, the likes of Melanie Hodge and Richard Foley are inevitably going to be left “in a cul-de-sac” (p. 189).
One of the most cheerfully buoyant and irrepressible characters in the novel is Len Hansen, a “scribbler” (p. 81) or “journalist” (p. 207), so much given to riotous partying and bouts of drug ingestion sessions that “he’s become accustomed to second-guessing the more physics-defying imagery that his mind is occasioned to pitch to him” (p. 141). The author has a lot of fun dressing Len Hansen in outrageous-sounding outfits (eg, pp. 32, 196, 297) that are presumably either descriptions of the appearance of real natural creatures — birds, perhaps, or fish, or butterflies — or plausible might-be descriptions of the same. If we were to read drug-taking as the pleasure principle in action, then Len Hansen’s bizarre variations of appearance and his frequent partying may simply be signs that he is a normally healthy, living creature — though the observation that he has taken to “second-guessing … physics-defying imagery” might suggest that Len Hansen would not be your ideal go-to guy for sensible, science-based advice on how to address an issue like climate change, for example.
Of all the characters in the novel, Len is perhaps the most curious and dogged asker of questions. Indeed, if there is any one psychological trait that defines him, it is probably his open-ended curiosity.
In the early part of this novel, Len’s curiosity has a crude and prurient tinge. For reasons not immediately apparent, Len visits Richard Foley, an acquaintance he has not seen for years, in the early stages of Foley’s recovery from the magpie attack (p. 50), and, in the process, makes a “drunken pass” at Melanie Hodge (p. 71). He subsequently sets up a daylight hours watch over Foley’s apartment, peering through Foley’s curtains early every morning hoping to see Foley and Melanie Hodge having sex (p. 69).
It is only after Len receives from Rocky the referee’s whistle pea recovered from inside Lula body (p. 113) and hears a suggestion that “a small contingent of rugby referees” nearby at the time, “four men and one woman” (p. 112), may have been responsible for her death, that Len becomes interested in tying the referees to the crime. At the same time, Len is keen to learn from Richard Foley “some things about the crash” (p. 249). He puts it to Melanie Hodge that the information he has gleaned about the condition of the tall man in the blue hatchback — how his feet had been broken, to get him into the small boots (p. 256) — “amounts to something that there is no practical choice in having an interest of some kind as to the connectedness or implications of” (p. 257). “Can you,” he asks Melanie Hodge, “just decide not to think about something ever because you’re not supposed to?” (p. 258). It is almost as if Len Hansen’s curiosity has evolved from that of a voyeur to that of a philosopher — or, at least, to that of a university student.
The weekly train trips Len starts making to Beechgrove to meet Corban Archer sound very much like university seminars. For “two straight months”, Len sets out at 11:47 AM every Wednesday for a “dilapidated old station under the Inner North Campus’s forecourt” (p. 194). There, surrounded by fellow passengers who “shared invariably the broad characteristic of being, each in his or her own way, curious”, Len finds “the cyclone of his week’s thinking … overcome by a vacuum”, as “everything erstwhile swept up in it: becomes “briefly available for … a reasoned inspection” — an inspection Turner captures brilliantly with that memorable image I cited above of Len “peck(ing) around in his mental debris with the calm discernment of a single ibis over a toppled rubbish bin” (p. 194).
Len initially seeks to “terrorise” (p. 300) a group of local rugby referees into confessing that one of them has played a role in the murder of Lula, “crawl(ing) into their heads like a spider into the fingers of a glove” (p. 199). After pursuing this line for some time, however, thinking of the referees becomes “a kind of spiritual poison” to Len, and he ultimately gives up this quest, recognising that he can “no more imagine the referees in an intelligent conspiracy than effectively wipe his ass with his elbow” (p. 300).
By the time he has begun engaging in extended colloquies with the dying referee prodigy Corban Archer beneath a “great, pyramidic pile of grey concrete building blocks”— a pile that presumably represent, in almost literally concrete form, the notion that as few as twenty amino acids are the “building blocks” of life — Len Hansen has become an almost unrecognisably different figure from his former self. After first taking up, and then abandoning, a quest to link five rugby referees to Lula’s murder on the strength of an alleged discovery of a whistle’s pea — “(a)n instrument used to direct attention” (p. 112), according to The Goldfish, or, perhaps a kind of Hitchcockian MacGuffin — Len has finally arrived at a place where he discovers for the first time “(t)he awkward gear changes and cul-de-sacs of actual thinking that reminded him … that he was really there, participating, in a shared reality” (p. 306).
By now Len has now been able to watch, over and over, the videotape to which Owen Lane directed him when expressing his reservations about Corban’s “unusual luck” (p 146) as a referee. According to Owen Lane, in the juniors game recorded on this videotape “(t)hirty seconds before the end of the first half a penalty is awarded right on the near touch line… It is correctly awarded, this penalty… On the same screen (Corban) can be seen calling the infringement and the infringement can be seen taking place sequentially. The law prevails.” Owen Lane has urged Len to obtain the tape and view it for himself “(t)o understand” (pp. 147-148).
Owen Lane doesn’t hammer his point home here, but it seems he is suggesting that Corban is seen on videotape calling an infringement which takes place only after he has called it — which, of course, is not the expected order of events at all.
I do wonder if this may be a reference to the scientifically-unsubstantiated notion that the course of evolution has been shaped by a principle of intelligent design — analogous to what would happen if the notional referee supervising the game of life were to have determined before it actually took place what evolutionary development would treated an infringement and what allowed to pass.
Len Hansen, we are told, has watched the videotape of this incident “perhaps fifty or a hundred times… initially with a sense of bafflement that melted into general bewilderment, and ultimately toward a kind of inward searching that emerged as awe” and, as a result, has come to regard Corban “with the reverence of a thing that follows no natural laws” (p. 301).
So, are Owen Lane — and Len Hansen too, for that matter — both suffering, at this point, from a serious misunderstanding of the role that should be played by an ideal of the game of life, based on their review of a single juniors game that was covered by only one referee and one camera (p. 147)? Are we really to understand, as Len Hansen apparently does at this point, that this ideal referee “follows no natural laws”? For what it’s worth, the only way I can make any sense of this is to read this tale of Len’s intellectual progress as we are encouraged to read so much else in this novel, which is to say, through an evolutionary lens. In short, it’s as if Len, like mankind as a whole, has to go through his “intelligent design” phase before reaching a more accurate understanding of how the game of life should and must really be refereed.
When Len is finally ready to hear from Corban Archer’s own lips, and not just by rewatching an old videotape, what is the true meaning of the game of rugby, what he hears is this:
“Rugby”, says Corban, is “no more than a game”, and it “has no higher purpose than play” — although this play “can certainly be slaughter”. Underlying this play, there is “only one condition, one idea. That idea is that possession of the ball is never a right… (E)very man on the field, at every moment, by unassailable, lawful means, can pursue possession for himself” (p. 319). What those on the sidelines fail to understand as they scream out the novel’s title after the referee has blown his whistle is that the players themselves “must ultimately be capable of adjudicating their own small conflict” (p. 319). The true role of the referee is not to ask the player “to refine or control his violent impulse” (p. 322), but rather “to keep alive what would naturally dissolve”, forcing the player “to exist as though his occasional impulse for violence is as enduring as it may seem to him when it arises in his throat” (p. 322) “You must exist,” says Corban, “in conflict as I have arranged it for you. As, in fact, you have asked me to” (p. 322).
This is an almost Nietzschean vision of the role of the life’s referee, stark and uncompromising, and certainly a million miles away from any likely that would be likely to enter the minds of such naff dunderheads as Jerry Pilwinkle, Jill Knox, Rory DeWitt and Owen Lane who, along with two of their partners, gather once a week to juggle drinks and struggle with meal timing arrangements in the Old Dining Room at The Pineapple. Turner’s portrayal of the appearance and dining behaviour of Leena Pilwinke (“rakish as a mantis” — p. 123), Jerry Pilwinkle (a “deeply invasive and slippery ideal of masculinity” — p. 125), Jill Knox (“with the effervescence of something way over-carbonated” — p. 127), Rory DeWitt and his wife Madelyn DeWitt (over whom Rory appears to have “some kind of inexplicably total psychological hold” that can only be explained by “him having made her from scratch in a laboratory” — p. 128) and Owen Lane (with the “look of something abandoned by its animating force” — p. 132) opens Part Two of his novel, and is as hilarious as anything you are ever likely to read — but even this hilarity has a serious point to it. Much of what makes the scene so funny is precisely that it is being played out over dinner, and that all these characters seem desperately anxious to establish the greatest possible distance between their supposedly refined dining behaviour, and that of their, ahem, evolutionary forebears (not to mention that of the very creatures whose cooked remains they are presently putting into their mouths).
Corban’s account does, however, throw a new light, retroactively as it were, on several passages we have read earlier in the novel. When Len’s nephew Milo is injured in an early-morning rugby game where Corban is officiating as referee, we read that “something unnatural was going on with his nephew’s right arm” as he lay on the ground, where he “breathed in petrified jolts, like a goldfish drawn from its bowl” (p. 42).
Whhhaaat??? Goldfish??? Is it not “The Goldfish” who later proclaims himself to be a native in a submarine zone of such “violence” as “you cannot know” (p. 109)? As Milo lies gasping, Corban, apparently with complete “indifference”, leaves the playing arena, ignoring a pursuing pack of hostile men, takes a swig from his water bottle, and then “oblivious, scan(s) the largely abandoned field back over the mob’s heads for something that remained out there still” (p. 43). His own, Nietzschean vision, perhaps? The chilling imputation seems to be that whatever has happened to Milo — his expulsion, as a goldfish, from his naturnal habitat — is the result of an act of violence that in Corban’s eyes is simply a necessary part of the play, and not something to be prevented at all.
What also returns to my mind is a passage where Rocky reminds Len Hansen what boarding school was really like by recalling an old school game where any boy attempting to “surf in the middle aisle of a bus” would be hit by the other boys if he touched anything with his hands:
And like all those games there was a way to explain it away so that it so that it sounded like a bit of fun and bonding… But the truth is that you give a kid in that place an iota of anonymity and a crowd and tacit approval of violence in the guise of something else then fists are going to come at a rate that expresses something pretty deep and unfriendly (p. 108).
When, trying to “trip Richard Foley into the flowerbed of an actual, emotional memory”, Melanie Hodge asks Richard if he was ever bullied at school, his response is far from convincing:
He had never, he said, ‘been sodomised, beaten or humiliated in a way that wouldn’t sound playful to you’ (p. 242)
Foley, we can see, is as determined to discount the reality of the violence that lies within ourselves and our companions, of which we are, in a sense, simply the natural heirs, and whose necessity the dying Corban Archer recognises and proclaims, as are the referees who meet each week in the carpeted hush of The Old Dining Room.
If, as I think we are intended to understand, Corban Archer’s depiction of the true role of the referee of the game of life is authoritatve, then why is Corban Archer dying? Is there some sense in which his avowed philosophy is not viable or sustainable? If so, how can that be?
Aunt Jacqui’s explanation to Len is somewhat cryptic: “He’s always been comprised,” Aunt Jacqui tells Len. “Unpopular even to his very own self… Autoimmune” (p. 333).
Immediately after the scene in which Aunt Jacqui makes this declaration, we meet one very contemporary-sounding couple for whom Corban Archer’s views would have been anathema: the insufferably woke “meta intellectuals” the Cheevers, who helped expand Organico’s scope through a “reinterpretation of the paradigm of ‘health'” (p. 335) while raising their adopted daughter Glenda to be so “pathologically carefree” (p. 337) that she eventually took to puncturing herself with a safety pin (p. 339). Confronted by daughter’s self-harming behaviour, “(t)he Cheevers remained steadfast in their commitment to enable and empower Glenda’s intrinsic urge for psychological and indeed spatial and social liberty” (p. 340), altogether ignoring “any notion that made its claim under the rubric of ‘gut feeling’ or ‘instinct'” (p. 341). When at last they “descended … into plain, unorganised and embittered argument”, both turned out to be “childishly unsuited, naive to the slinging of personalised arrows” (p. 343) — a fate less likely to have befallen, as adults, I would suggest, those much-pummelled bus surfing boys of whom Rocky spoke to Len earlier (p. 108).
Autoimmune, says Aunty Jacqui, explaining to Len why Corban Archer is dying. When an autoimmune disease takes hold, the defence system that normally functions to protect the human body corporate wrongly identifies some element in that body as alien and takes action to reject it. I read Aunt Jacqui’s explanation of why Corban is dying as signifying that humanity at large has come to the point of rejecting Corban’s notion of what is the true role of life’s referee, preferring, instead, the supposedly “softer” approach we see played out in the hopeless wokeism of The Cheevers.
Before I bring this piece to a close, I must draw attention to two of the most novel’s most arresting images, as each represents, it seems to me, a poetic elaboration of the stark principle Corban Archer has articulated, and which seems to consitute this novel’s intellectual spine. Each image is given to us, fittingly, through the eyes of Melanie Hodge, the other figure in the novel, alongside Len Hansen, much given to interrogating the superficial meaning of things — in her case, almost always in the context of what she would like to be an intimate relationship.
One night, on the Toob, Melanie happens to see “a pair of naked men exchanging mutual oral sex beside a docile Irish wolfhound”. The sight strikes her “as a spectacle of flesh rhythmically engulfed and engulfing, as amazingly neutral as an octopus complexly furling and unfurling the many parts of itself simply to remain unmoved… a kind of neutral and consenting playfulness expressed as violence” (pp. 386-387).
On a second occasion, Melanie is watching a rugby game from the sidelines.
(T)he moment a captured player fell to the ground, the white ball thereby released into pure and dispassionate contest, instantly holy according to the game’s spiritual code, she sat on the cusp of tears as body after body rushed to the sacred site, making a kind of fabric-and-flesh housing for what neither party was permitted to touch. It came to seem to her that this was what the players really wanted but could not elsewhere or without arbitration bring themselves to ask for or agree upon; to build something among themselves, of themselves (p. 390).
These are both deeply haunting images, presented to us almost as a kind of prayer, it seems to me, by the author. Taken together, they constitute a powerful and effective answer to that question that curious and troublesome pest Len Hansen insists on putting to Melanie Hodge: “Can you just decide not to think about something ever because you’re not supposed to?”
Not after reading this novel. No.
By now it should go without saying that I can now see my initial reading of Let the Boys Play was hopelessly inadequate. I mistook as a work of literary “cruelty” (in Artaud’s sense) what I now recognise as a masterpiece of defamiliarisation. This novel is as intricately and carefully inscribed as one of Cressida Campbell’s meticulously contrived mono-prints. Unlike Cressida Campbell’s art, however, this work presents a view that at first seems utterly and completely strange. Only upon reflection do we come to recognise that what is before our eyes is actually a view something familiar that is being presented to us in a wholly new (dare I say novel?) light.
Around the time I ordered my copy of this book (early 2025), the author’s agent Martin Shaw gave me to understand that Let the Boys Play was offered to, and rejected by, a number of major Australian publishers. What can I say? That Australian publishers are idiots should not be news to anyone. Rejected and despised novel may have been, but it is clearly a masterpiece, and anyone who has had the privilege of reading it needs to shout that from the rooftops.
I’m well aware that there is much more that needs to be said about this book. However, I have already rambled on at considerable length — at greater length than any reasonable person could be expected to follow, in fact — and I’m keen to be done so I can finally head off and take a peep at what others have been saying about this novel, a temptation I have been resisting until now out of a dogged determination to figure out as much as I could for myself.
If you’d like to start a conversation with me about any aspect of this book, I’d love to hear from you. Do please leave a comment below.
May 2025
Postscript: 24 May 2025
After I first published this piece, it occurred to me that the unusual wording “THY SONS MAKE PILLAGE” that appears below the statue of “a boy who could not have been more than three years old … sitting silently with studded headgear hanging from his neck” (p. 41) might be an anagram. Possible solutions for such an anagram that I found included GAME KILLS LAST NEOPHYTE, THE GAME PLAY TONES SKILL and GAS KILLS NEOPHYTE MA — the last of which did seem (at a stretch!) a plausible summary of the novel’s last chapter.
As I was proposing some of these supposed “solutions” on social media, Martin Shaw reveaIed that Thy Sons Make Pillage was actually a previous title of the novel.
I now recognise that the phrase comes from Titus Andronicus, a play explicitly referenced in the novel (eg, p. 94). Here is part of Aaron’s speech in Act 2, Scene 3 of the play:
Hark, Tamora, the empress of my soul,
Which never hopes more heaven than rests in thee,
This is the day of doom for Bassianus:
His Philomel must lose her tongue today,
Thy sons make pillage of her chastity,
And wash their hands in Bassianus’ blood.
Exactly how this passage may relate to the novel I cannot say. It does seem pretty clear, though, that it is probably also Philomel’s tongue that shows up on p. 84 when we read that “Lula’s tongue had since been found on her bedside dresser”.
