Play

This dynamic and probing novel kept me reading long into the night. The protagonists are four boys who have grown up together but who are from very different backgrounds and parental role models. Luc, indoctrinated by his father, is a sports fanatic and misogynist. Johnny, from a privileged but emotionally barren home, plunges himself into unfettered wildness while Matt, the artist, is trying to come to terms with his sexual identity. Mark’s family is impoverished and, in the search for the money he needs, he unwittingly and dangerously becomes involved in county lines.

The boys are all fragile, but think that they are not, and they are all feeling their way towards what passes for masculinity in their (and our) confused and fragmented world. They both challenge and support each other in an environment which too often offers only uncertainty and anxiety.  Palmer unerringly captures the boys’ voices and behaviours from childhood to the world of young adults. This is, par excellence, an examination of small-town claustrophobia and masculinity, the one often dripping slow poison into the other.

And yet, there are possibilities – always possibilities, even when misguided choices narrow their number down. Johnny’s recklessness – both physical and mental – results in his death when, having taken far too much cocaine, he falls during a climbing stunt. But even as he is dying, he escapes into an existential consideration of the possible alternatives in the trajectories of his friends’ lives and the results of those options, those choices. In the end the reader must decide which paths the boys will take and what the consequences of those choices might be.

This is a courageous and exceptional novel: courageous because it tackles themes which are not readily engaged in elsewhere and exceptional because there is no clumsy stereotyping to seal development into neatly packaged boxes. There is room to meander, to retrace steps, to reconsider, to allow characters to make mistakes and to experience powerful and all-consuming emotions.  Play is exquisitely written and beautifully balanced: and the world it takes its readers into is not one from which we return unscathed.