FICTIONEVER GOT TRAPPED in an elevator? For a very long time? You could do worse, far worse than being stuck with Jasper Dean, the bewildered and not exactly suffering-in-silence son of Martin, a man with a vast store of opinions - and many problems, not least his failures.
Jasper, at the mercy of a chaotic family history and his freewheeling flair for one-liners, sets out to tell dad's story, and several other yarns, in the course of a long, long book that not only races along at a manic pace but more or less runs for its life.
Australian newcomer Steve Toltz takes one of literature's enduring themes, that of father and son, and injects it with a frenetic wit as well as commendable pathos, all in a first novel that manages to keep the reader rolling in the aisle and glued to his or her chair - not an easy feat, but Toltz brings all the energy and assurance of a young Peter Carey to this burlesque, bravura performance. Where to start? Well, it doesn't really matter - the narrator's mind and memory are as full as his battered heart. It is worth pointing out, though, that the Wall Street Journal review quoted on the jacket has got it quite wrong: A Fraction of the Whole is not at all like John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces; if it is like anything at all, it does have many echoes of Carey's virtuoso extravangza, Illywhacker (1985), in that one huge pulse throbs throughout the narrative, a pulse that is unmistakably Australian.
It should be noted that it is Toltz, not his famous countrymen, the great Carey nor Tim Winton, who features on the Man Booker longlist announced last month. The inclusion of Toltz confers some credibility on the judges and adds considerable energy to the selection from which the shortlist will be culled. Should Toltz survive, here is a Booker contender likely to acquire cultdom. Even should this lively, emphatic, bizarrely intelligent book fail to make the final six, it doesn't matter; it will live because Toltz has given it a real voice and a beating, bursting heart.
He has also achieved a defiant coup. Few unknown authors set out to write books of 700 pages plus, and few publishers want them. In an age when people text rather than speak, and communication has been reduced to soundbites as no one possesses much of an attention span any more, Toltz has written a tale that stops only a page and a few lines short of Book One of War and Peace. So why so long and why so good? Well, largely because the narrator, with a little help from his dad, Martin, has quite a story to tell. And, significantly, because Toltz has peopled his long novel with relatively few characters, and this handful of individuals are so well-drawn it feels, rather scarily, that most of them are likely to leap out of the pages in an effort to tell you their version of events. Scared? Good.
Most of my life I never worked out whether to pity, ignore, adore, judge or murder my father. His mystifying behaviour left me wavering right up until the end. He had conflicting ideas about anything and everything, especially my schooling: eight months into kindergarten he decided he didn't want me there any more because the education system was "stultifying, soul-destroying, archaic and mundane". I don't now how anyone could call finger-painting archaic and mundane. Messy, yes. Soul-destroying, no. He took me out of school with the intention of educating me himself, and instead of letting me finger-paint he read me the letters Vincent Van Gogh wrote to his brother Theo right before he cut off his ear . . .
Martin's life has been dominated by the presence of his brother, Terry, who began as a sporting hero and, following an accident, turned to crime. Jasper knows bits and pieces about his Uncle Terry, who apparently died young in another accident, the same one that killed the hapless parents of Martin and Terry Dean. But before old Terry died he had won the heart of the lovely Caroline, the very girl that Martin happens to adore. For all his book-reading and intellectual ideas, Martin is a disaster. When he meets another girl, who then becomes the mother of Jasper, she dies. Come to think of it, there is a great deal of violent death in A Fraction of the Whole.
It all begins in a prison cell. It is there that Jasper decides to pass the time by telling his father's story. Toltz cleverly allows Martin to do some of the work, as he had kept a journal. Martin's voice conveys a strong sense of someone who knows he has made mistakes but can't really help it. Jasper is different; he has experienced a childhood shaped by his father's mad ideas and multiple errors. By the time he is a teenager, Jasper is just about speaking to his father, the bond is there.
IT IS THIS bond that gives the book such appeal. His tells his father's story with a mixture of fascination and exasperation; his own experiences are related with marginally less patience. There are many brilliant set pieces, such as a sequence involving a boy at school who is bullied to his death. He is the son of one of the teachers, who is, in turn, also pushed beyond his limits. Because he knows his characters so well and develops them into three-dimensional beings, Toltz can write punchy, succinct dialogue. When Jasper begins to woo a girl he attempts to appear cool by making a phone call and claiming to dial a number "at random." The call is answered. "Hello?" "Hello." "Who is this?" "It's me. Is that you?" "Who is this? What do you want?" "Never mind that", I said. "How are you?" "Who is this?" "I told you. It's me."
One of the characters, Anouk, enters the action because she vandalises Martin's car, presuming it is owned by some rich person, and she despises wealth. She becomes their housekeeper and then, eventually, through a crazy scheme that Martin becomes involved in, the richest woman in Australia - but that is just one of the many stories racing around in the world of this book. Everything is connected and interconnected. Characters disappear, even die, but they tend to come back. Martin, having decided he must be ill, persists in this belief until he really does become terminally sick. By then he is the most unpopular man in Australia and has to flee, thus bringing the action, the narrator and Martin to Thailand.
The Thai interlude is hilarious, resurrecting a ghost and making several more. Then Martin, the man who has spent his life denouncing Australia as well as the entire concept of nationalism, realises he must return home to die. The only way back is illegally with a group of runaways aboard a criminal ship. Although Jasper has poison with him in case things turn nasty on the ship, Martin, by now in desperate pain, declines the chance of killing himself: "In short he was never ready. He vacillated interminably. He always found a new excuse not to do it: too rainy, too cloudy, too sunny, too choppy, too early, too late. Two or three days of agony passed in that way."
For all the laughs, and there are so many, this is a dark, often tragic book. Jasper is that truly terrifying personage, every parent's child, while Martin is that equally unsettling entity, a parent. Childhood is the sum of everything and Toltz explores this with such relentless perception that all one can do is begin at page one and hang on through a study of life - and lives - out of control. Zany it is, yet Toltz sustains the journey by not only making us laugh but by delivering several meaningful pokes in the eye. The child who sees everything grows into the adult who remembers every gesture, every passing comment.
• Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times
