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Jon Doust

Författare till Boy on a Wire

6 verk 55 medlemmar 6 recensioner

Verk av Jon Doust

Boy on a Wire (2009) 34 exemplar
To the highlands (2012) 13 exemplar
Return Ticket (2020) 3 exemplar
Magpie Mischief (2002) 2 exemplar
Return Ticket (2020) 2 exemplar

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A yarn about a game of footy in the timber milling country of south western Australia where the players are bigger, tougher and more audacious than anyone can believe.
 
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Readingthegame | Jun 20, 2020 |
Return Ticket is the third and final instalment of Jon Doust’s trilogy of memoir/novels following the adventures of the hot-headed Jack Muir. It follows the acclaimed Boy on a Wire, where Muir pursues justice for a boy bullied at the boarding school Jack attended. To the Highlands charts Muir as a wild young bank johnnie in Papua New Guinea, his hot-headed and heavy drinking lifestyle a snap-back against the repressive hypocrisy of his school. At the end of To the Highlands, Jack Muir is a damaged drifter.

Return Ticket is set first in South Africa, where Muir encounters laid-back marijuana smokers and the vicious racism of the apartheid regime. In two kibbutzim in Israel, a failed love affair and arduous work begin the task of redeeming the man. Jack Muir’s sense of justice, first kindled by the bullying at his boarding school, is honed by the socialist and utopian vision of the kibbutz.

Muir returns to Western Australia, where he loses the moral compass of the kibbutz and drifts dangerously again. Eventually his mother, despairing of her alcoholic son, gives Jack the money for a return ticket to Israel. There in a different kibbutz, Jack eschews alcohol and drugs and meets a woman who loves him, damaged as he is.

Jack feels he is a grown-up man and returns to Western Australia to mend relationships with his family. His reconciliation with his father on a riverboat on the Blackwood River is a touching episode.

As with the former two books, it is hard to know in The Return Ticket where memoir ends and novel begins. While Jack Muir is fiction, Doust has mined his own life and experience to bring this trilogy to life. The broad outline of Jack Muir’s life has many parallels with Jon Doust’s own life, but the real life is skilfully crafted into a narrative that reveals an arc from damage to restoration.

I have a sliver of insight into the narrow path Doust is treading between memoir and fiction. I was in Jon’s year at boarding school, and I am honoured to continue to call him friend 60 years on.

The books are each self-contained and can be read as separate novels. However, reading the three books reveals the larger themes and triples the reading satisfaction.
The key theme of Return Ticket is that one person’s genuine love for another can draw that person out of the neediness of addiction into responsive love. It is a timely and timeless message.

The writing has about it clarity and beauty. Jon made much of his living since returning to Australia as a comedian. As you would expect, a dry Australian humour permeates the narrative and lightens the serious themes. Buy your Return Ticket to Jack Muir’s story; it is an entertaining and thought-provoking journey.
… (mer)
 
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TedWitham | May 14, 2020 |
Return Ticket is the third and final book in Jon Doust's searing trilogy One Boy's Journey to Man. Boy on a Wire (2009) is Book #1 of the series and was longlisted for the Miles Franklin (see my review) and Book #2 is To The Highlands (2012, see my review). The novels are semi-autobiographical, so they have an authentic rawness about them, tracing in Book #1 an unhappy boyhood despite a privileged background, and in Book #2 a disastrous sojourn in Papua Guinea. In this third novel the protagonist Jack Muir goes farther afield, seeking a sense of contentment which seems to elude him wherever he goes.

The story shifts across time frames and countries as Jack takes off on a hippie trail, beginning in South Africa under apartheid in 1972 and then to Israel in 1973, finally coming home in 2018 to Kincannup (the Noongar name for Albany WA). South Africa, not a place I would have associated with the hippie trail in the 1970s, turns out to be a choice more disconcerting than he had expected. The drugs are good, and since his wealthy family are his financial backup, he has no real money worries, but the real life impact of apartheid appals him.
The Jan Smuts International Airport central hall was full of people all colours and shapes. Except, of course, the departure queues — there were no black skins there. All the non-white skins were standing around with brooms and buckets and cleaning, or readying themselves to clean up after the white skins, who made a mess in toilets, dropped lolly wrappers, newspapers, sodden handkerchiefs and even, Muir noticed in one corner, a smelly bundle that looked like a nappy. The whites were flying out and flying in, but the others were staying put, there to tidy up and even if they wanted to fly, there were no queues for them. And air travel was for the wealthy.

Then he remembered he wasn't. Or hadn't been. The difference between him and the handsome young man standing outside the male toilets with a mop, was that all Jack Muir had to do when he ran out of money was to call his father and ask him to send more. (p.51)

There is a devastating sequence when Jack is chatting with an acquaintance about his schooldays and the multicultural nature of Australian society. He goes on to mention that there was one kid who was Aboriginal but if there were others, they didn't say. His South African companion is gobsmacked:
Didn't say? What kind of a country is that? You have to say if you are Aboriginal? Do you have to say if you are Greek?

Yeah, because you could be Italian, or Yugoslav, maybe even Lebanese.

No, no, no, you people have it all wrong. Next you'll be telling me you only knew the Jews were Jews because they said they were Jews,

Of course.

You mean, you don't have race police coming to your house and taking hair samples and telling you who you are or what they want you to be? (p.36)

What makes this book unputdownable is the way despite the risks, Jack refuses to comply with apartheid laws.

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2020/01/22/return-ticket-by-john-doust/
… (mer)
 
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anzlitlovers | Jan 22, 2020 |
My sheltered childhood is long behind me but I had a sense of disbelief when I read about the brutality of boarding school life in Boy on a Wire. Long-listed for the 2010 Miles Franklin, it’s a fictionalised memoir, based on Jon Doust’s own experiences at a boarding school in Western Australia in the 1960s. The routine violence that was inflicted even for minor misdemeanours was institutionalised by both masters and boys. Relentless bullying and bastardisation were part of the school tradition, and dobbing was never done. As a teacher myself, I cannot imagine working in such a brutal and degrading atmosphere, much less trying to learn anything there as a student. See my review at http://anzlitlovers.wordpress.com/2010/05/08/boy-on-a-wire-by-jon-doust/… (mer)
 
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anzlitlovers | 2 andra recensioner | May 7, 2010 |

Priser

Statistik

Verk
6
Medlemmar
55
Popularitet
#295,340
Betyg
3.9
Recensioner
6
ISBN
22

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