Don’t spoil this devastating novel by reading too much about it first

FICTION
Bugger
Michael Mohammed Ahmad
Hachette, $34.99

An odd way to begin, but: avoid reviews of Bugger if you plan to read it.

Although I’ve read Michael Mohammed Ahmad’s Tribe trilogy—The Tribe, The Lebs, The Other Half of You — I went intoBugger without reading the blurb or pre-publication marketing guff. Bugger confirms a trend in Ahmad’s fiction, which is a movement from the collective to the individual experience. Later, when I got around to the blurb, I found the marketing copy cryptic, even vague. It says that Bugger follows 10-year-old Hamoodi and his teenage cousin Alooshi over one day. It notes the thematics — family, language, trust, power, abuse — but doesn’t tether them to a specific dramatic catalyst. It’s a curious thing, against the grain of contemporary publishing and marketing tactics: a novel published without a clear hook or elevator pitch. What’s at stake for Hamoodi? Why this day out of all others?

I carried these two questions with me through Bugger. The novel uses this mystery to deliver its ending, which is a genuine shock for the spoiler-free reader. This is Ahmad’s gambit. Bugger, a novella in length and structure, is the antithesis to front-loaded novels desperate for their reader’s immediate and unyielding attention.

It’s the most intimate and cloistered of Ahmad’s books, told through the prism of Hamoodi’s consciousness as he goes about a regular school day in the early 1990s, revealing himself as a gentle soul, deeply upset by bullies and authority and everyday cultural fissures. He relies on Alooshi, an older cousin and semi-deadbeat who wags class and loafs about Hamoodi’s mum’s apartment, often staying the night.

Ahmad maps out Hamoodi’s life: his father, a journalist, has gone missing after he returned to the mother-country (although never explicitly named, there’s enough environmental storytelling to suggest the country is Lebanon). Left behind, Hamoodi’s mother tries to raise him and his little sister Annabel under the strain of tough socioeconomic conditions and the disappearance of her husband.

Hamoodi lives by the lessons of his father, who is a ghost in the text, speaking constantly from the past: “Don’t ever sully your tongue, your body, your soul, my father made me promise.” Problem is, Alooshi, the novel’s agent of chaos, embodies too many paradoxes for Hamoodi to figure out. He swears, eats junk food, bashes kids, steals, and perceives his rule-breaking as a stage of early enlightenment. At the same time, he has become a temporary role model in place of Hamoodi’s absent father. Idolisation and ambivalence; a toxic combination.

The novel reveals its true focus in the final 50 pages, in which Hamoodi experiences a terrible and violent end to his childhood. Hamoodi’s naivety, so well established by his new discoveries of language and words, his obsession with the Power Rangers (there is an entire chapter devoted to a Power Rangers episode), and his lack of vigilance, makes the climactic betrayal all the more brutal and unforgivable. Bugger is an epiphany fiction that reminds us that all moments of sudden and paradigm-shifting revelation are not always to “higher” states of being. There is such a thing as a dark epiphany, a breakthrough towards ruin.

All of this I’ve written in hindsight, of course, and I think Ahmad’s novel has a great obstacle to overcome that will likely determine its readership. Bugger’s ending achieves story resonance, that cherished quality of the art form in which the reader, having finished the last page, casts their mind back across everything that has come before. What will divide readers is whether they’re willing to ride the book out to this point, to stumble alongside Hamoodi towards a dark and uncertain future.

In praise of re-reading, Vladimir Nabokov famously argued that “one cannot read a book: one can only reread it”. Unlike a painting, which can be conceived in a single glance, taken as a whole then examined closely, a book reveals itself gradually, page by page. Reviewers and critics worth their words re-read books as a professional necessity. But today’s literary marketplace seems at odds with the practice of rereading. Whether it be the publishing cycles of hype and obsolescence, competitive book lists and public reading goals, the obsession of readers and publishers alike with first-page hooks and dramatic immediacy, the demanding impatience with which we approach books — entertain me, right this instant! — are geared towards the fast take.

The very point of Ahmad’s Bugger is the ordinariness of abuse. The YA-infused everyday-ness of the first 100 or so pages is supposed to disarm the reader, lull you into a false sense of security, precisely because its ambition is to document with great verisimilitude and authenticity what it feels like to be 10 years old and betrayed by someone you love and, worse, to not truly know the extent of the devastation at the time. Not all violence is explosive.

I believe that Bugger ends too soon, dramatising the moment of loss and leaving the aftermath unwritten. Having built to this single swell of dramatic consequence, we leave Hamoodi on a dangerous threshold: a violent act of abuse within his family results in the premature end of his childhood innocence. What happens next to Hamoodi? Is he corrupted, possibly irreparably, by this act of violence?

I wonder whether this is the first instalment in a new series of works. Dog into wolf, light into twilight, boy becomes beast.

The Booklist is a weekly newsletter for book lovers from Jason Steger. Get it delivered every Friday.