The Mary Smokes Boys

Table of Contents

 

 

 

 

 

The Mary Smokes Boys
is a gem. The writing is absolutely terrific and the characters distinct and deftly revealed. This story is a heart wrecker.

BARRY LOPEZ, author of
Light Action in the Caribbean

 

Patrick Holland’s beautiful, beautiful novel is a tale that transports you through its realisation of place and its genuinely affecting story of love (for brothers, sisters, mothers, fathers). And yes, for a language as pure and magical as I have read in a long time … A major work.

MARTIN SHAW,
Readings
newsletter

 

One of those books, one of those straight-to-the-heart, life-changing books.

KRISSY KNEEN, author of
Affection

 

Barely a scene or image is wasted … He weaves Hemingway’s blunt sentences and carved dialogue with the old fashioned storytelling of a folk tale imbued with the dark romance of a Nick Cave ballad.

JO CASE,
The Age

Pulp Curry
’s Top 5 Crime Books of 2012

 

This both a stunning page-turner and an investigation into the dim caverns of the human heart and soul that bears comparison to Graham Greene and Joseph Conrad. Holland is, quite simply, one of the best prose stylists working in Australia today.

MATTHEW CONDON, author of
The Trout Opera

 

Patrick Holland has joined the ranks of the adventurer novelists and enhanced his growing reputation.

MICHAEL ROBOTHAM , author of
Say You’re Sorry

 

In many ways,
The Darkest Little Room
is the perfect 21st-century Australian novel, exposing the cruel underbelly of life in the Asia-Pacific region while also managing to be a cracking read.

CHRIS FLYNN,
The Age
and
Sydney Morning Herald

 

Patrick Holland will be one of Australia’s greatest writers of the future. I can’t say you heard it here first because everyone is saying it.

KRISSY KNEEN,
The Sunday Mail

 

This is a wonderful book, destined for the shortlists.

LISA HILL,
ANZ Lit Lovers

 

Wonderfully drawn characters, acute and often painful observations about the expatriate condition, a vivid depiction of Vietnam, and a breakneck plot make this a mesmerizing read.

ANDREW NETE,
Pulp Curry

 

The Darkest Little Room
… is as gripping and thrilling as it is effortlessly artistic and lyrical. Many titles these days are billed as literary thrillers but this one truly fits that description.
Book Rating
: The Story 4/5; The Writing 5/5.

BOOKLOVER BOOK REVIEWS

 

There is a directness and spareness to the prose that beautifully balances out the action and the more traditional elements of the plot, and the slow, meditative tension easily calls to mind the dark romance of Greene’s
The Quiet American
.

JESSICA AU,
Readings

Riding the Trains in Japan
succeeds in the difficult task of offering the reader a fresh vision of places and histories, of catching the impression of distant voices and also of offering the kind of insight only acquired through travelling.

THE AUSTRALIAN

 

Beautiful and bittersweet … written in tough lean prose, its denouement leaves a lingering impression.

SYDNEY MORNING HERALD

 

A quite brilliant debut.

THE AUSTRALIAN

 

His imagination is unrivaled.

GOOD READING MAGAZINE

 

Quirky, magical, melancholic and utterly readable.

BOOKSELLER +PUBLISHER

ALSO BY PATRICK HOLLAND

Tarry ye here, and watch with me.

MATTHEW 26:38

GREY NORTH LOOKED DOWN TO THE LIGHTS OF THE CITY’S winter exhibition. Mechanical rides flung children and lovers across the dark, and their delighted squeals could be heard even from the hospital. A pair of nurses crossed the corridor between rooms. One whispered “poor boy” and vanished. Grey’s newborn sister took her troubled sleep in a room at the end of the hall. His sister was always to be called Pia, but now would be called Irene after her mother.

A rocket was launched at the exhibition grounds. The rocket slithered high into the sky and burst in a brilliant gold spider’s web. Grey followed the falling embers to where a procession of cars’ red tail-lights meant the end of the night.

His father came into the corridor and smoothed his thinning hair with his hand.

“Come see your sister, boy.”

But Grey did not shift from the window.

“It wasn’t because of her. Your mother wouldn’t stop bleeding.”

She had been only twenty-six years old. He had come home from school and she lay bleeding on the floorboards.

“Her heart gave out, boy. It was just–terrible luck.’

Grey was ten years old and did not believe his mother’s heart would give out on its own. Something could have saved her.

“William North,” a nurse called down the corridor. The
man acknowledged her with a nod and the nurse took his arm and led him to a room where he would speak with the doctor.

Grey watched the last of the fireworks bloom in the window pane.

 

THE INFANT IRENE was kept overnight for observation and Grey and his father stayed at one of a row of northern suburbs airport motels. It was a franchise motel with clean standardized rooms for people who had been somewhere and would soon be going somewhere else. A place between the places life was. At the motel you could be exempt from life. It was impersonal and soporific. They spent two nights at the motel and Grey did not cry. Out the motel room’s one window were waterlogged flats, the flare of a distant oil refinery, a long and lighted bridge proceeding into the dark.

 

THE NURSES AT the hospital tried to impress upon Bill North some rudiments of infant care. They suggested a home-calling nursing organization and a pediatrician whose names he would not remember. They gave him pamphlets and wrote names and telephone numbers in his notebook.

Grey and his father spent another night at the motel where Grey did not cry.

 

WITH HALF THE money he had in the world Bill North arranged for his wife’s body to be returned to their home.

On the evening of the drive home Grey did not speak. The infant Irene sat between her brother and father in a bassinette in their truck.

Grey watched the brilliant city dissolve into the industrial western outskirts. Neglected parks. Commuter tract wastelands. Concrete brothels bearing names of flowers in neon–Tiger Lily, Lotus, Sakura. Colossal empty shopping centers whose monotonous geometry invited vandalism. Wisps of juvenile gangs at the edges of shadows and inside dim culverts. A degraded passage
through which Grey admitted the consoling dream of the world broken.

After the outskirts, Highway 54 ran through rolling country, ever emptier, until the dark was broken only by spare dots of light adrift on the horizon. Then came the family ’s home in the Brisbane Valley. Mary Smokes was a town surrounded by blowing fields. In the west was a broad corridor of flatland before the Great Dividing Range before immense inland plains. North and east were lakes and a filigree of rivers and the D’Aguilar Range.

Wide and empty country in which the world had no interest.

Bill North turned his truck north off Highway 54 and drove across a rail line onto the Brisbane Valley Highway. A half-dozen men were loading horses in a yard close to the road. Grey’s father stared out his open window but did not slow the truck. The truck’s headlights brushed the man Grey had heard his father call Tanner. Grey looked back at the obscure shapes of men working in only the deck-light of a bodytruck. He wondered if the horses were stolen.

Further north along that road, a mile south of town proper, was their house, a weatherboard cottage beached by an ocean of plain. Grey got out of the car into the cold and looked up at the stars. Silence and darkness made the stars fierce. A sleepless horse walked the fenceline, rattling the wire as it brushed and leant across it to the green pick in the Eccleston houseyard next door.

 

BILL NORTH LIT a wind-guttered candle on the kitchen windowsill. Without its orb of light, without the window, were the hills that channelled wind like water and the emptier plain and the silence that the wind tore into, and there all human attempts to reassure the eye and know the dark were swallowed. He lit the potbelly stove with rolls of newspaper and mixed powdered milk in a saucepan on the stovetop. He took a block of boxwood from the pile beside the stove and pushed the block into the coals.