Review: Poly by Paul Dalgarno

What if Helen Garner's Monkey Grip had been written by Tim Winton, been given an added dash of black comedy and been set in contemporary Melbourne? The result, I suspect, would be not unlike Poly, the debut novel from Australian writer Paul Dalgarno. 

Chris and Sarah are turning forty and are in something of a slump in their relationship. Or to be more specific, there's no sex between them any more, and the guy that Sarah met six months after she and Chris married has recently passed away and she's taking it all rather badly. Then again, Sarah is pretty much self absorbed in every possible sense. It's difficult to understand why she is still even with Chris, or why he would still love her, but they're together, they have a son and a daughter and they have decided that the key to saving their marriage is to embrace a polygamous lifestyle. Or more specifically, Sarah wants to have lots of flings with various men and Chris decides to let her, because it beats the alternative of losing her. But there are a few surprises in stock, mostly in the form of Zac, a twenty-something friend who seems like a saviour at first, but soon becomes more trouble than he is worth, and with Biddy, the musician that Chris falls in love with.

Poly is a dark comedy that does what dark comedy does best--it takes an honest and frank look at human relationships. The result is all rather uncomfortable and will probably divide readers into two categories--readers who love it and readers who loathe it. For me, it was a great read, though uncomfortable on occasions.

Recommended.

Thank you to Ventura Press for my copy of Poly.

This book was read as part of the Aussie Author Reading Challenge 2020

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Peppermint Patty: I Cried and Cried and Cried

Image
Unrequited love is a common theme in the Peanuts Comics and is one that I have previously explored on this blog. We know that Lucy loves Schroeder, Sally loves Linus and Charlie Brown has a crush on the unseen, unnamed and utterly unattainable Little Redhaired Girl. But perhaps the saddest unrequited love stories from the comic is that which ran in late June 1972. It was the series of strips where the usually self-confident Peppermint Patty came face-to-face with the Little Redhaired Girl with the intention of thumping her and then something surprising happened: Here we have a usually self-confident girl, who is funny, unashamedly herself and talented at sports reduced to tears by the realisation of who she is not and never can be. I really feel for her in this series of comic strips. She knows that Charlie Brown can never love her, when he is so hung up over a girl who represents a supposedly ideal feminine beauty. Fortunately Linus, the most spiritual member of the Pean...
Read more

Charlie Brown, Lucy Van Pelt and the Football

Image
One of the longest, and arguably, most infuriating, running gags in Charles Schulz's otherwise brilliant Peanuts comic strip, is where Lucy promises to hold a football for Charlie Brown and then pulls it away at the last minute, causing Charlie Brown to fall flat on his back. A typical strip looks like this: Source: Go Comics The gag is one of the darker themes in the strip. It works on the concept that every year, Lucy promises to hold a football for Charlie Brown. Every year, Charlie Brown is initially filled with doubt but is eventually pushed on by a kind of optimism that perhaps, this time, Lucy might just let him kick it after all. As a metaphor for life, it is pretty simple. It talks of the moments when we choose to put our trust in people who have let us down only to be taken by surprise when they let us down, again. Lucy is, arguably, one of the crueller characters in the comic. Described as crabby by the other characters, she is often selfish, takes delight in wilfully hu...
Read more

Phrases and Idioms: Tickets on Himself

To have tickets on himself: (Australian slang.) To be conceited or vain. To have an overinflated opinion of oneself.  He's got tickets on himself if he thinks that any woman would fall for that. I was thinking about this particular bit of Australian slang the other day, after my boss said, "He's got tickets on himself," to describe the actions of a particular individual. At the time, I smiled, knowing exactly what the boss meant. Later on, I started to ponder on this unusual phrase and wondered where it might have come from. A search on google helped me find the definition, but that was about all. There are no references to it being used in pop culture or literature (if you find one, let me know,) and at the time of writing this post, Tickets on Himself was not listed on Urban Dictionary. (I tried to add it, but the fuckers rejected my definition. They probably think I have tickets on myself or something for trying to add a relatively common piece of A...
Read more