By Carl Shuker
Penguin | Reviewed by Charles Bisley

WHERE would we be without sheep? It is fascinating to follow their tracks through our literature; from the lost sheep in Janet Frame’s The Day of the Sheep to the newly shorn sheep of Joanna Paul’s Imogen, their presence is iconic. In Carl Shuker’s second novel The Lazy Boys, started before his prize winning The Method Actors, the iconic sheep is a dead one.

Richard Sauer, the novel’s eighteen year old narrator has his own way of seeing things. Once he saw a drowned sheep trapped underwater. The sheep was creating a ripple in the dark still water- well, not the sheep but an eel animating it as it fed, working its way from the inside out. In his imagination a younger Richey compounds this image with a story his companions tell of how they stoned a sheep, till it jumped off a cliff to its death (its ok, the sheep was old). The two sheep become confounded, a killed one, in a vision of death in life, of a violence that riddles his story. Disturbed and disturbing.

Where did it all start? In the hard lessons his father taught him? “Don’t get smart with me boy... I’ll put you in the bloody hospital.” In the culture of bullying at Timaru Boy’s High? How will the boy become a man? A Southern man at that? A tender hearted boy? Richey rejects the sweet boy that his friend Anna reminds him of. Perhaps she is his only friend. She is dying anyway. He filters out the saving memories of his childhood, of times spent by the placid Lake Alexandrina. He dismisses his mother.

No shame. That’s the story. That’s the attitude you need to be accepted by your mates. You have to be hard – no shame is the fend when you’re not sure of yourself. Whatever you do, however things turn to shit, the thing is not to show any anxiety, any feelings at all. If you do, you’ll be branded a fag. If you’re labelled a fag, you may as well kill yourself. The trick is not to be noticed. In this world boys learn to say yes because if they say no, they might start questioning you and yeah.

The anti hero of this novel doesn’t play rugby, or any sport. So he’s on the backfoot. But then he discovers that getting wasted and spewing on the sofa is a start towards acceptance and manhood. Serious drinking is his lifeline. And bullying the sideline (If you’re not for us, you’re against us). The trouble is, if you’re not mainstream (who is) it’s hard to tell when you’ve passed the test. You take respect however you get it. Richard Sauer’s rite of passage leaves a trail of havoc. Rugby is the game of this novel; his fall is like a scrum folding. Collapsed or twisted. Is it something that happens or is it self inflicted, Richey wonders. To the reader it seems both, and equally.

If you are leaving school and can’t think of what to do, why not enrol at Varsity (in this case Otago). Get away from the folks, from the claustrophobia of half a city like Timaru. Get a student loan, a lump sum. Get on the piss, do drugs, score a few chicks. Boys will be boys, after all – isn’t this just a stage? Not in this story. This isn’t the rollicking world of Baxter’s Ode to Mixed Flatting. Not a picaresque genre piece like Scarfies. It is a provocative satire, a horror story. It turns squalid and deep, taking the reader into territory that some will recoil from. I suppose it could have been set anywhere-say Hawera, or Brighton. But Shuker knows his Dunedin – cold and dark, dramatically provincial. What a hell of a place to escape to. Talk about isolation. Good for nihilists and sectarians (I love to visit – some of my best friends hail from there).

Over his flat Strangeways looms a deserted castle. It’s at the door of this castle that Richey hammers at the end. No one answers. The Maquis de Sade has been dead a long time. The denouement veers away from life, towards Mishima perhaps.

The Deep South has always been a good setting for the culture of unease; Shuker outdoes his predecessors in the literary virtuosity with which he calls up the familiar demons from the abyss, the abyss whose rim the crowd stumbles along rowdily. Listen to the thoughts, the idiolect of the peer group. Its conformism, its nicknames, its abusiveness, its banality, its brutality, its misogyny, its homophobia. In a word, ugly. And yet for some it’s one big party. A big night that you can’t pike out of.

Fear and loathing in Dundas Street. Don’t drug-induced rampages become boring? Souse’s fall becomes more and more of a stagger. We know he is going to succumb to his demons, but he takes his time. At times it drags, this self-obliteration; Richey gets bored, it takes more and more to get him going. At others, the acuity of his observations skewers attention. There’s a calm about Richey, when he’s not jittery. His observations are beautifully rendered, whether lyrical, dramatic or phantasmagoric. Returning home for a breather “Timaru is silent and gray, a smell like watery tinned salmon drifting up from the harbour.” At an aftermatch function in a motel he notes the youth of the girls on the white couches “sipping beer from plastic Speight’s 500ml cups and some of them look nervous and almost all of them have collars that are standing straight up.”(Lion Breweries may not find all the product placement a positive). Inside a bus in a line of traffic in a snowstorm on the Kilmog “I can only see my own reflection in the window, half-darkened, fluttering and flickering, tentative and ghostlike in the flakes of snow closest to the side of the bus.” It’s not all random:The lighting may be sporadic, but Richey seems to be going somewhere.

On another level the novel is naturalistic, clinical. Given his upbringing, this is what will happen. The expert Dr Johanssen spells it out for Richey in her Book of Murder. How violence is socially learnt. How Richey has lost his self. Where depression and anger will lead him to. What will release him from his paralysis. In a society where violence is socially acceptable. Inertia builds through endless rounds of chaos. In the end he has no choice. He has no identity, he is possessed. The shock of the climax seems a setup, prefigured as it is by his violent opening gambit. The logic is exact.

“Ta go. Who ta go”. Don’t we find the painted tribe picturesque? Hasn’t rugby cleaned up its act? The Lazy Boys brings it back into disrepute. Rugby is never going to be the beautiful game. Here’s Matt, the pizza dough maker, an artist, a sort of friend to Richey. At a clash with the Boks at Carisbrook, the crowd hooliganism gets too much. What he can’t take is the cop-out, the laziness of the spectators who can’t think of anything better to do. “So long as you’re a hard cunt and you hammer another guy, people like you and respect you, right.” Matt sees it as a failure of imagination.

Richey is not allowed to sit in his father’s Lazyboy, but he does anyway. He doesn’t only sit, he masturbates over pornos, volume right down, while his parents sleep overhead.

The after match functions are horrific, even for Richie. He gains admission through mistaken identity, and shows his outsider status in his jitters. Hilariously and disastrously, he tries to confide his malaise to Marc Ellis. This is almost the nadir of his not being understood. Until I got to this section, I was dubious about a dare a friend of mine said he witnessed in a Dunedin bar involving another notable rugby player and a coprographic act. In The Lazy Boys the surreal can be so convincing. The burning sofa on the terraces was another standout performance. The only scene with Maori: Hell’s Angels.

Apart from reading this for the hell of it, is there a lesson in Shuker’s version of the Fall? Even if he doesn’t intend it? A companion to Celia Lashlie? Could a reading of him tell us more about where our boys are going wrong, or at least serve as a warning? Give us second thoughts about sending our kids to Who ta go? It wasn’t as bad as that in our day, was it?

Recently I ran into some Old Boys. Not one of them a Richey – all success stories. When they’d had quite a few, out came the other stories. They reminded me of Ancient Mariners but with a glazed eye rather than a glittering one-not over the gutter yet. It wasn’t pretty. It was obviously the time of their lives. Mate.