Uncompromising. Uncategorisable. Unlikeable—and unlike anything else. Terms like these were the sort thrown about to describe Nicholas John Turner’s début novel, Hang Him When He Is Not There, when it was published several years ago. Just listen to the discussion that took place when Hang Him landed on the longlist for the 2018 Republic of Consciousness Prize. Neil Griffiths, the founder of the prize, invited three guests—the critics Catherine Taylor and Jonathan McAloon, as well as the short story writer Eley Williams—to read the novel and account for its uncanniness. Between them they developed a consensus that Hang Him was indeed an achievement of some kind. It was “galvanising and energetic,” “brilliant, terrifyingly cruel, funny in a slapstick way.” The quartet recognised Turner’s sense of literary ambition and agreed that he was, as McAloon put it, “extremely intelligent, extremely adept at language.” What remained undecided was the question of whether the début was a one-off or the work of a dependable talent. Given its singularity, did Turner have the skills to repeat the feat with his follow-up, or had he, in Taylor’s words, “squandered it all on one book”?
Now the follow-up has arrived to resolve the uncertainty. Nothing about Hang Him When Is Not There was a fluke. Turner’s new novel, Let the Boys Play, is easily its precursor’s equal, and in some respects more daring. It reads like the work of a restless writer: one who agitates to try new things, unsatisfied with re-running old manoeuvres. The earlier novel was structurally fragmented, each chapter being narrated by a new “voice from nowhere” with an enigmatic relation to the narrators of the other chapters. Let the Boys Play, in contrast, is less polyvocal and has a more legible timeflow. It’s set in Brisbane at some stage in the future, in a milieu that amounts to a corporatised dystopia, and it moves through a sequence of events in a relatively linear way. Insofar as the narrative is a skewed police procedural, its linearity is basically a generic constraint. It’s set in motion when a man is found dead at the wheel of a car and a mismatched pair of officers start hunting for whys and wherefores.
But as various divagations branch off from that starting point, the narrative, while maintaining a linear chronology, grows outward in a Lynchian manner. Its attention begins extending into arenas of life that are tangential or adjacent to the investigation: underworld crime, community sports, the corporatisation of human physiology. As a result, in Let the Boys Play, Turner toys with a wider cast of characters than in Hang Him—while remaining just as suspicious of psychologising the individual players—and, although his various narrative strands all arc back towards his central mystery, their relationships to it are more associative or incidental than causal. Readers who desire coherence won’t be satisfied; they’ll find their desires preyed upon.
Where Let the Boys Play supersedes Hang Him—to an extent that is often surprising, hilarious, and horrifying—is in the versatility of the language it applies to all things fleshly. Ben Lindner touched on this when he reviewed the novel last year, identifying Turner’s “real talent” as “writing about bodies and physicality. This book is the most physical book I have probably ever read. There is something visceral about the way he writes about bodies and sex and violence and even the heat.” This really can’t be said strongly enough. Every page of Let the Boys Play feels like it’s soaked in bodily fluids. Hardly a paragraph goes by without an unbelievable distortion—sometimes literal, sometimes figurative—of some hapless character’s limb, appendage, digit, extremity, epidermis, internal organs, or head. Some readers of Hang Him might not find this so remarkable, since disfiguration was, in that novel, both a theme and a narrative incident. Still, it’s hard to overstate how much more relentlessly and intensely Let the Boys Play focuses on bodily phenomena, especially the forcible rearrangement of corporeal matter.
Bodily dysmorphia as more than a disorder of the mind—as an experience or a phenomenon with visible, tangible outcomes—is the novel’s overriding concern. Let the Boys Play is packed with accidents and injuries, breakages and deformities, physical abuse, body modification, tissue repair, implantation, even biohacking: occurrences of these things are recorded and dramatized and the results are explored in forensic detail. Consider this: although these pages contain an abundance of exposed penises, Turner will specify, at every encounter, whether or not what’s in your mind’s eye should be circumcised. The purpose of this specificity—as with that of each piercing, stitch, scratch, and sag—is to radically narrow the focus first onto a part of the body, then onto an alteration to that body part. Page by page, image by image, each new focus on a new alteration contributes to a cumulative vision of the body as a pulsing sack of degradations, of wounds either scarred over or still suppurating: a carnal record of the damages done in the course of a lifetime. And if this sounds somewhat ungenerous, readers of Hang Him shouldn’t find that so remarkable either. “Ungenerous” was, after all, one of the other terms applied to Hang Him during the discussion above. The judgment came from Eley Williams, who observed in the novel “a kind of categorisation” of women’s bodies via comments “about how morbidly obese they are, what their breasts are like, the hardness or firmness of their nipples. [It’s a] kind of othering [with] a horror of obesity.” What’s remarkable, really, as evidenced by those plentiful penises, is that Let the Boys Play delights in the same kind of othering—and brings gender parity to it.
How, in a technical sense, does Turner pursue his mode of othering? Although his characters are all superficially grotesque in their own ways—and the most grotesque of all is a man with a distinctively grotesque penis—the outlandishness of the othering depends on more than descriptions of appearances based on a simplistic calculation such as “grotesque = ugly.” Turner is, as Jonathan McAloon pointed out, “extremely intelligent, extremely adept at language,” and the closer you look at his language, the clearer you can see the intelligence making other calculations. These calculations underlie recognisable grammatical patterns and rhetorical figurations, not just the adjectives that give persons their physicality, and collectively they serve to estrange Turner’s characters from their own senses of bodily integrity. To see the characters’ grotesquerie as skin-deep is to miss half of Turner’s dark magic. What makes them so outré is as ambient as it is embodied. They’d be out of joint with the world—and themselves—even if their skin was unblemished.
To begin with, Turner uses an otherwise innocuous grapheme—the apostrophe—as a force of estrangement. When functioning as a possessive marker, the apostrophe relates something owned to its owner: “the man’s car,” “the woman’s house,” and so on. As a genitive marker, however, it functions slightly differently: it identifies something that can’t be owned—at least not in the same sense as an object or commodity—and relates it back to its source. What is generated can be physical, as in “the child’s hair” or “the cloud’s shadow,” or it can be abstract, as in “the president’s reputation” or “the community’s fears.” To be sure, Turner uses the apostrophe in both of these ways, more or less conventionally, when he writes of “the man’s head” and “the passenger’s feet,” “Foley’s pervasive reports” and “Tsolkas’ well-privileged opinion.” But he also uses the apostrophe to attribute qualities to objects in a way that functions possessively, thereby imparting ownership to something too inert to be capable of it. Sometimes he does this by inserting an apostrophe into a noun phrase to establish a quality as a possession: instead of “the belt buckle,” he opts for “the belt’s buckle,” and instead of “his cotton shorts,” he opts for “his shorts’ cotton.” At other times, he uses the apostrophe in place of the attributive “of”: so, rather than “the left-side windows of the small car,” he prefers “the small car’s left side’s windows,” and rather than “the grid of fields behind the backs of the spectators,” he prefers “the grid of fields behind the many ongoing games’ spectators’ backs.” Then, too, he uses the apostrophe in this way when describing the properties of his characters’ bodies. What might’ve been “the angle of her hips” becomes “her hips’ angle,” and “the top of a blonde baby’s head” becomes “a blonde baby’s head’s top.” And when one man gives another a hand signal—a fist, clenched and unclenched—the man loses possession of himself: rather than the man’s fist and fingers, Turner writes of “the closed fist’s back” and “the hand’s extended fingers.” In the aggregate, throughout Let the Boys Play, this use of the apostrophe contributes to a world in which non-human entities have the distinctly human property of possessiveness—usually of subordinate entities—while living people lack full possession of their own body parts.
If there’s an improbable quality to many instances of the above, particularly when multiple apostrophes pile up within a single sentence, it’s minor by comparison to the improbability of Turner’s similes. Often, Turner strikes a likeness between a character’s action and an image which, while vivid and arresting, is tonally at odds with the stimulus for the comparison. When a skinny girl, whose body exhibits a “general flatness and frailty,” exaggerates her hips by wearing “a high-waisted blue skirt,” she looks like “a compact disc in a long sock.” When a man with a wounded arm holds the skin together with “a profusion of metal-grey stitches,” the limb looks like “a giant, cylindrical dog’s hairbrush.” When another man, in a drugged haze, stumbles into a dark room with naked bodies “scattered across the ground all around him,” he notices that “all the men’s dicks were circumcised and folded across them like arrows pointing somewhere he was frightened to follow.” When a rugby player emerges from a pile-on “with one of his eyes hanging from its socket and the greater portion of his cheek’s flesh folded down to his chin like neatly carved meat,” he touches the wound “to confirm the flesh and eye’s hanging like a wind-displaced toupee.” When, during sex, a woman looks down “across the horizon of her stomach” to see her lover’s questionable erection, she finds his penis “stretching as he drew away, then kind of kinking and bunching at the threshold of her as he drove forward again, falling inside her like a slug through a pair of floorboards as a heavy tome crashes upon it.” And when that man loses himself in the act, he gurns and grimaces “as though he intended to suck his whole face inside out,” and his teeth fret at his lips “as frantically as a hand at an elusive parachute release.”
At heightened moments throughout Let the Boys Play, Turner even piles up the improbable similes, sentence after sentence, the same way he piles up the apostrophes. One man recalls the hot, delirious summer during which, when he returned home from work, he “blew his nose and gnats invariably came flying out.” Most of the gnats, Turner writes, “were dead and strung together by yellow mucus like passionfruit seeds.” Some, however, “endured the journey home in his sinuses and, once expelled, swirled around in ecstatic patterns under his bathroom’s coverless fluorescent globe like tiny, negative fireworks.” But why stop at just two similes in succession when three or four will intensify the estrangement? A man glimpses an obese woman who is, at first sight, “hugging her great breasts like things she was keeping warm.” When the woman approaches and glides past, “stark naked,” she is “bulbous and swaying... basically a stack of bouncing spheres on short stilts.” As the man’s eyes descend to “the beard of silver curls between her legs,” the mass of pubic hair “wink[s] at him between her steps like a scaly fish disappearing into coral.” And when he notices that “leather ribbons loosely enwrapped her shapeless, pink and red ankles,” those bonds across her skin look to him “like kitchen string cut away from a rolled pork.”
Let the Boys Play is nowhere more impressive—nor more devilish, nor more ludicrous, which in this novel amount to the same thing—than when apostrophic estrangement combines with successive similes in one of Turner’s ultra-close-up descriptions of action towards or against a human body. The sex act above includes this bravura passage:
[Melanie Hodge] was deeply self-conscious about her small and oddly-shaped breasts, and Richard Foley respectfully ignored them. She typically wore a shirt in the act of love-making, and if passion or circumstance conspired against her, she used her arms to obscure his view or otherwise manipulated herself to keep his eyes away, even at the height of intercourse, as he strove to orgasm through her. While her splayed, bent legs hovered around him, he would plant his hands on either side of her, showing her the veiny whites of his hyperextended elbows’ crooks, arching and swelling like a released genie, their heavy breathing backed by the throbbing percussion of his hips flatly striking her hamstrings. She would invariably reach up to his iron bedhead and grab onto one of its vertical bars, twisting the upper half of her almost all the way around like a piece of hard liquorice to obscure herself even then.
And the gargantuan L. Gato, a villain with a body of impossible proportions, precipitates the following passage when he is roused from slumber:
He rubbed his eyes with his working hand, his index finger’s knuckle digging bluntly, his cheeks distorting like a sack with a cat in it as his tongue again audited his gums. ... The great, pink, hairless nipples atop his pert breasts surged skyward as he yawned, loosed from the lapels of his faded, royal blue police-issue towelling robe. He reached down under the pillow into his threadbare y-front underwear to air their contents, before scratching, in turn, the scratching arm’s own armpit, his hip, and then his left nipple, which he proceeded then to encircle with varying pressure with each of his hand’s fingers excluding the thumb, the hard nipple acting under its encirclement and probing like a wine bottle’s cork protruding from set jelly.
There’s more, of course, as this monstrous man pursues his sexual proclivities and the atmosphere of grotesquerie condenses around him. He sits at ease in a favourite chair, “leaning back to accommodate an erection whose circumcised head looks uncannily like a cobra’s.” He “props up the penis’ base with both hands like he’s keeping a restless toddler from toppling off his lap.” He has his desires satisfied by “a twenty-two-year-old North African drug fiend with no name... [whose] small, brown boobs’ large lipstick-pink nipples [droop] like disapproving thumbs.” At one point, surreally, this skinny figure “scuttles across the room and then crawls up the back of and over L. Gato’s shoulder like a spider.” During intercourse, “L. Gato’s penis is thicker than either of [the drug fiend’s] own legs and points directly at her insides like a rocket at a distant atmosphere.” Close to climax, he puts one hand over her face while the other grips her waist, “applying compounding pressure, like the juicing of a stubbornly hard orange half.” And yet the language lavished upon L. Gato is as unsettling in moments of delicacy as it is in moments of tension. When he strips off his clothes to take a shower, exposing to the water his forbidding obesity—his “abundant and soapily morphing flesh”—he is “graceful” in nudging aside his discarded underwear, an act that resembles “a Japanese tea ceremony performed in the shadow of a tsunami.”
Are you still here, still reading? All right. If you’ve followed my thinking so far, I take it that none of the quotes I’ve pulled from the novel were grotesque enough to turn you away. In all likelihood, then, you’re the kind of reader Let the Boys Play is looking for: open to the oddities of Turner’s approach to language, intrigued by the calculations his sentences rest on. And should you now enter the novel, stepping fully into Turner’s world, you’ll find its reality destabilised by other qualities beyond these ones. There is, for example, a warping of the setting, an almost mathematical way of registering the spatiality of environments. Turner prohibits a sense of immersion in a believable place and situates the reader somewhere starker, more geometric, composed mostly of textured planes that seem to want to tesselate but never really touch. There’s also a view of interpersonal epistemology best described as mechanistic: in the novel’s understanding of how people might understand one another, the intuitive and speculative aspects of sympathy are diminished or else rationalised. This cold epistemology colours many of the interactions between characters as well as a long stretch of dialogue, intricately designed, which sounds nothing at all like genuine speech and yet amounts to one of the novel’s most alive, most invigorating passages.
In combination, all of these qualities are stimuli for an experience similar to—well—I don’t know what. I’m not sure I can give it a name that fits the way it feels. I’m not quite prepared to call it captivation or pleasure. It’s a kind of perplexed contemplation, a sense of disorientation under a sedative. It’s like the coming-to-awareness of an emergence from anaesthesia, albeit renewed with every page and therefore purgatorial. Each component part of the world hits the eye as a hyperreal thing, but the world as a whole is distorted as each part’s relation to others remains inscrutable, in shadow. And if, at this juncture, I’m tempted to look around for points of comparison, other works of literature that might convey the feeling by association, I’m also reminded that my touchstone while reading the novel wasn’t literary at all. It was the art of Francis Bacon, his body of work, from his bestial crucifixions to his sinister howling popes and his blasphemous self-portraiture. With his sharp points and severe edges amid wild swirls and gyrations, with his torturous forms degenerating into smears that are merely suggestive of human shapes, what Bacon stimulates visually, Turner replicates in prose.
But isn’t that sort of comparison a cop-out? Isn’t it pathetic to just give up, to find no likeness in language for Let the Boys Play? Maybe—or maybe it’s a way of prizing the specificity of the novel’s own language, and reaffirming my initial response as a reader. When I first spoke about Let the Boys Play with Ben Lindner, in an off-mic conversation, I said something to this effect: the experience of reading the novel is rooted so deeply in Turner’s textual particulars that to abstract it—even if to communicate it to others—is instantly to lose it. Ben referred to that assessment in one of our later conversations (from 13:38) and similarly struggled to make the experience explicable. That’s because it derives from individual word choices and the pulse of the prose, from the syllable counts of subclauses and skewwhiff syntactical manoeuvres, from Turner’s persistent delight in messing around with sense-making and with sentences’ metrical properties. Descriptions can’t really convey it; summaries cause it to decohere. Understanding what it is to dwell awhile in Turner’s world, deep inside his sentences, requires either an alternative to language—a visual evocation—or else an unmediated encounter with his, in all its uncompromising and uncategorisable glory.