The Shallow End by Ashley Sievwright
Book
Lou Swinn
This book was shortlisted in this year’s Commonwealth Writers’ Prize Best First Book Award. It’s set around Prahran pool where one hot day a man simply disappears, leaving behind his clothes on the bench at the pool. None of his friends know what could have happened to him.
Our narrator has just come back from Spain and a love affair gone wrong. We don’t know exactly what’s happened but we know that the narrator is none too happy. His sister is an estate agent and she’s got him a place to stay short-term before he finds a place of his own; all the narrator knows is that the Docklands apartment he’s staying in is the Melbourne home of a famous man; gradually, he refers to him as Mr T, a former sports star, and possibly gay, but in the closet.
To keep his mind off his own troubles, our narrator starts obsessing over the missing swimmer, whose name, like a boring paint colour, is Matt Gray. The narrator starts to follow the case. He also visits the Prahran pool, and ends up taking up with one of the pool regulars, Gil. Later, we find out that Gil is the missing man’s best friend, and doesn’t want to talk about him. So the mystery deepens, and there is suspicion surrounding all of the people involved with the missing man. And what makes it confusing for our narrator is that even though he’s practically living with this friend of Matt Gray’s, and Matt Gray’s disappearance is his current obsession, he can’t get Gil to talk about him at all.
And no one can get our narrator to talk about what happened with his love affair, what went wrong in Spain – what happened to his boyfriend, Leo.
Ashley Sievwright is a really entertaining writer and this book is super easy to read. It’s an internal story as much as anything, about loss and blame and guilt, and how people can pass in and out of other people’s lives. There is plenty of philosophising on the ways that people communicate, and on how we point the blame, and about the way society operates.
From page 151: “We talked it out a bit and came up with the theory that people can disappear, or disconnect a bit in their thirties. Just fritz out and lose reception for a little minute before tuning themselves in again. That in our twenties we go on a journey of self-discovery which is endlessly fascinating to us, finding out who we are and what we want and exploring our sexuality and our spirituality and our soul, and discovering others who are like us and just getting our shit together. But then somehow in your thirties it’s no longer so internalised and it starts to be more about what you’re going to do with what you’ve discovered, and you start comparing yourself with what other people are doing, and suddenly it seems like everyone else is doing stuff that you should be doing. Everyone else got the jump on you somehow and they’ve started families and bought houses and shit, or have brilliant careers, or else they just seem so together, or driven, and know exactly what they want. And all your self-discovery stuff doesn’t seem quite so relevant anymore, you know, and you feel a bit left behind and translucent.”
Who hasn’t felt like that? Sievwright has a nice way of putting things, and he builds this drama quietly and subtly, towards an interesting conclusion. It’s in many ways a quiet book and I don’t think it got a lot of notice when it came out but it’s definitely worth a gander.
