Boy Swallows Universe – Trent Dalton

I’d imagine, for most of you, Boy Swallows Universe needs no introduction. It’s one of the biggest Australian books of the past decade. First published in 2018, it became the fastest-selling debut novel in Australian history, selling more than one million copies around the world, and won an unprecedented four Australian Book Industry Awards. For a while there, you couldn’t swing a bookmark without hitting Trent Dalton. And, this year, I finally got around to reading it!

Trent Dalton is a journalist by trade, but – surprisingly – you wouldn’t know it from reading Boy Swallows Universe. In my experience, books by journalists (especially debut novels) tend to have very clipped prose, a very journalistic tone, and focus more on the facts and not so much on the feelings. Boy Swallows Universe is the complete opposite of that – it’s fantastical and flowery, totally bucking the trend.

It’s also, apparently, semi-autobiographical, based on Dalton’s own childhood in 1980s Queensland. He’s said it’s a “50/50” blend of fact and fiction. He did indeed have a troubled mother and a drug-dealing stepfather, and his babysitter/mentor was convicted murderer Slim Halliday (the only character in Boy Swallows Universe who is 100% real). The older brother character, Gus, is an ‘amalgamation’ of Dalton’s real-life three older brothers, he says.

All of me is in here. Everything I’ve ever seen. Everything I’ve ever done. Every girl I ever kissed on a wagged school day, every punch I ever threw, every tooth I ever lost in a Housing Commission street scrap and every flawed, conflicted, sometimes even dangerous Queenslander I’ve ever come across, as the son of two of the most incredible and beautiful and sometimes troubled parents a kid could ever be born to… Boy Swallows Universe is me taking all my own secrets this time and turning them as respectfully as possible into a novel.”

Trent Dalton (on Boy Swallows Universe)

A quick overview: Boy Swallows Universe is set in Brisbane in the mid-1980s. The narrator, Eli, is twelve years old when the story begins. He has “a lost father, a mute brother, a junkie mum, a heroin dealer for a stepfather, and a notorious crim for a babysitter”, so it’s fair to say that the cards are stacked against him.

He’s determined to make the most out of his life, despite it all. He wants to be a crime journalist for The Courier Mail, and might just be able to turn his troubled childhood into a front-page story. His mother being imprisoned, his finger being cut off by his step-father’s boss, his brother predicting the future, his father spiralling deeper into alcoholism and depression – it’s all copy.

It’s funnier, and more poetic, than it sounds.

I have suspected Mum and Lyle are drug dealers since I found a five-hundred-gram brick of Golden Triangle heroin stored in the mower catcher in our backyard shed five days ago. I feel certain Mum and Lyle are drug dealers when Slim tells me they have gone to the movies to see Terms of Endearment.

Boy Swallows Universe (Page 14)

Boy Swallows Universe does, however, warrant a pretty strong trigger warning. There’s drugs, of course, and also really graphic violence. If you have any qualms about kids being neglected or mistreated, you might want to give it a miss, too. The same goes for the TV mini-series adapted from the book, and produced for Netflix earlier this year – I haven’t seen it yet, but I’d imagine a lot of the same content appears on screen.

I mostly enjoyed Boy Swallows Universe more than I thought I would, but it goes a bit off the rails in the third act. It’s like Dalton couldn’t quite rein it in in the final stretch. There’s secret buildings and Machiavellian schemes and psychopathic henchmen and body parts in jars… it’s all just a bit much.

It’s definitely a different perspective on Australia – less sun-kissed beaches and beautiful bushland, more suburban noir and seedy underbelly. Boy Swallows Universe isn’t perfect, and risks being over-hyped, but I can see why it made a bit of a splash.

My favourite Amazon reviews of Boy Swallows Universe:

• “I do NOT like dirty language as those words cannot be used for many meanings, and there are so many to express ourselves in the English language. I also disliked the supposed outer world views.” – Lynette Rowland
• “In my opinion, an objectionable book, I would advise reasonable and normal people to avoid.” – Aspiring
• “If I knew any Australians well enough to despise them, I’d feel they deserved this book… Reading Boy Swallows was work and the payday was just minimum wage.” – Rick Tanner