Top Bloke by Gordon Graham

Top Bloke

by Gordon Graham

(Stephen's updated bibliography of short fiction)

(Review first appeared in The West Australian)

Spree killers and Port Arthur-style massacres may seem an unlikely topic for humour, but that’s what lies at the heart of Gordon Graham’s second novel. It makes for an extremely black comedy, but Graham - the author of Stuffed, and the AWGIE-award winning play The Boys – has the skill and confidence to pull it off. The end result is somewhere between Pulp Fiction and Fight Club, with some of the flavour of recent Australian comic thrillers such as Two Hands and Dirty Deeds, and just a hint of Pyscho.

The narrator, Gerard Oakes, is an aging hoon (though an oddly literate one); a sexist, hard-drinking, unthinkingly violent hybrid of Bazza McKenzie and Conan the Barbarian who never accepts responsibility for any of his own failings, from his financial foul-ups to his threatening behaviour to his frequent projectile vomiting. Oakes, who admits that he doesn’t have much time for thinking but “takes pride in being right on top of the situation at all times”, is about 99 per cent clueless, especially when it comes to people. Particularly himself. He sees himself as a top bloke, and has difficult understanding why some people don’t think of him the same way.

Oakes’s life begins to tall apart when he is suspended for life from playing Rugby League after mooning a female umpire. Between arguments with his coach, he manages to alienate his girlfriend badly enough that she begins packing her bags. Then a news flash interrupts the football highlights. A man has just been arrested after going on a shooting spree with a Chinese AK-47 copy in a shopping mall – and Oakes suddenly recognizes him as Lester Allardyce, the loner who lived in the flat below the one Oakes shared with his previous girlfriend.

Oake’s situation continues to deteriorate rapidly. His beloved V8 Commodore is stolen, and when he reports this to the police, he learns that a driver he’d rear-ended that morning has accused him of threatening behaviour. He’s fired from his job as a cigarette salesman, then evicted from his flat after flooding it. His favourite suit, a Taiwanese counterfeit Hugo Boss, is ruined. And he discovers that Allardyce had kept a list of people he wanted to kill, including ‘Gerard – Football’.

Oakes becomes enraged when he learns that two other men are claiming to be Gerard Football, particularly when the media ignores him in favour of Gerard Taylor. Granted, Taylor went to school with Allardyce, but Oakes remembers urinating on Allardyce’s carpet the day his previous ex-girlfriend threw him out, a week after the Port Arthur massacre: surely, he thinks, he has a better claim to fame! He becomes even angrier when the ex-girlfriend, Julie, is also interviewed and he becomes convinced she’s lying about her age.

Oakes’s sanity begins to fail as he blunders from one disaster to another, and he becomes increasingly isolated, paranoid, and delusional. He videotapes every news story about Allardyce, and carries the tapes everywhere. He begins haunting the scene of the massacre, stalking Julie and her boss, compiling his own list of people he hates. Soon he’s out in Bogong Crossing drinking with a pair of pig-shooters who believe that Martin Bryant must have been framed by the government “because no genuine lunatic could shoot that well”. They lend him a Chinese AK-47 copy and all the ammo he can carry, and he makes his way back to Sydney.

This may sound rather too grim to be funny, and Top Bloke will certainly not be to everyone’s taste – not that good taste is often a selling point in black comedy. Any reader who identifies too closely with Gerard Oakes may find the book heavy going, because Graham’s send-up of the stereotypical Aussie male is particularly savage, but even they may find themselves laughing involuntarily as Oakes’s situation becomes increasingly weird.

Top Bloke does a fine job of combining comedy and serious social commentary, with a twisted and surprising plot that makes it difficult to put down. Highly recommended, especially if you need more irony in your diet.

Publisher: Arrow Australia (paperback)

ISBN: 1740512340