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khakipantsofsex's review
3.0
So it wasn’t bad but it wasn’t great. It’s so very Omar Musa though, the three characters, particularly Solomon, feel like they’re based off of himself. I felt like I only skimmed over the top of the story since it’s definitely not something I can relate to personally. A few curious stylistic choices too but I’ve never heard or read anything by Omar before, I just know the guy as a friend of a friend, so it could make more sense to someone more familiar with his style.
wtb_michael's review
3.0
A fierce, angry book about the Western suburbs of Sydney, Here Come the Dogs is the story of three young men trying to find their way and stake out their identities in a society that's pretty ambivalent about them. Rooted in hip hop and clubbing, in sport, drugs and drinking, this is a brutal and intense look at life for second-generation Australians. The relentless masculinity of the book started to wear me down after a while, but Musa is a talented writer with plenty to say about communities largely ignored in Australian literary novels.
archytas's review
4.0
There is so very much this book is about, and yet, in the conversation with me this book had, what stands out is how very much about Queanbeyan it is. And maybe the only way to tell a story about something which is about so very many different things, is to make it about something so specific - not just multicultural Australia, or underemployed youth or life in the suburbs that service cities, but a story about three young men with ties to multiple cultures and little prospect for a career-ladder or a comfortable financial life, living in Queanbeyan, Canberra's much-ignored other half.
From the start I was expecting Irvine Welsh stylings, and it surprised me about halfway through to realise that the comparison was much more surface level than I expected. Musa's use of language, an unfamiliar lyricism to create and explain a subculture, is reminiscent of Welsh yes - and both of them move seamlessly between poetry and prose, masters of both - however there is a rawness of anger in Musa which Welsh, whose work layers cynicism and ennui so thickly, mutes. By the time the Wire popped up as a reference, it was already on my mind. There is an Australianess to the anger, to the telling of stories as they are with the underlying demand they should be better - Dorothy Porter and Frank Hardy were more on my mind by the end. It is also worth pointing out the degeneration of one character's mental state was covered in a very magical realist way, reminding me of all kinds of weird referential material.
But I was going to say something about Queanbeyan wasn't I - the blue-collar suburb nestled in Australia's white-collar mecca, a town of disempowerment in a City of Power, the place of bogans and 'ethnics' just minutes from the hipster haven. Queanbeyan might be 15 minutes from the centre of Canberra, but it costs nearly $10 on a bus each way, an enforced segregation more about culture and class than distance or logistics. Queanbeyan lives and breathes through Musa's prose - the pubs with a constant undercurrent of violence, the beautiful, evocative, sweet smelling bushland, the suburb-meets-country-town streets of low and middle income housing. The anger, the frustration, the resilience, the pride in being real when your people service a town where authenticity refers to the organic feed of the free-range chook you eat.
Ok, I'm losing control of this review, so back to the book proper. Musa's genius is in invoking the lives of his specific protagonists, and in the process raising everything from the barbarity of call centres to refugee policy to racist policing and the impossibility of being stuck between cultures, where you otherness is all that ever seems to define you. Unlike like, David Simon, however, Musa's work is not about posing solutions. It screams "LOOK" and "LISTEN", and in achieving that aim is remarkably successful.
However, in presenting the viewpoint of the protagonists, Musa struggles a little I think in how to tackle some of the more destructive elements of their lives. This is worst when it comes to the sexism, and downright misogyny that saturates the book. Solomon, the first character we meet, has a liberal feminist girlfriend when we start, who subs in for the cluenessness of white Liberals in general, and feminists who ignore class in particular. Musa then attempts to introduce stronger female characters, and the suffering of others under sexist and misogynist attitudes is presenting the background. But with no clear POV from women, the anger that is directed towards women is never explored as an impact. Women end up feeling as voiceless to the reader as the protagonists feel to society in general. There can be a sense that marginal, working-class existence is a male phenomenon.
To a lesser extent this is also true of the violence, which plays a strong background role, with little voice for the impact of being on the receiving end.
I have lots of thoughts about this book, but in the end it is a representation of why telling Australian stories are so important. Without our own fiction, we are a people without a sense of who we are.
From the start I was expecting Irvine Welsh stylings, and it surprised me about halfway through to realise that the comparison was much more surface level than I expected. Musa's use of language, an unfamiliar lyricism to create and explain a subculture, is reminiscent of Welsh yes - and both of them move seamlessly between poetry and prose, masters of both - however there is a rawness of anger in Musa which Welsh, whose work layers cynicism and ennui so thickly, mutes. By the time the Wire popped up as a reference, it was already on my mind. There is an Australianess to the anger, to the telling of stories as they are with the underlying demand they should be better - Dorothy Porter and Frank Hardy were more on my mind by the end. It is also worth pointing out the degeneration of one character's mental state was covered in a very magical realist way, reminding me of all kinds of weird referential material.
But I was going to say something about Queanbeyan wasn't I - the blue-collar suburb nestled in Australia's white-collar mecca, a town of disempowerment in a City of Power, the place of bogans and 'ethnics' just minutes from the hipster haven. Queanbeyan might be 15 minutes from the centre of Canberra, but it costs nearly $10 on a bus each way, an enforced segregation more about culture and class than distance or logistics. Queanbeyan lives and breathes through Musa's prose - the pubs with a constant undercurrent of violence, the beautiful, evocative, sweet smelling bushland, the suburb-meets-country-town streets of low and middle income housing. The anger, the frustration, the resilience, the pride in being real when your people service a town where authenticity refers to the organic feed of the free-range chook you eat.
Ok, I'm losing control of this review, so back to the book proper. Musa's genius is in invoking the lives of his specific protagonists, and in the process raising everything from the barbarity of call centres to refugee policy to racist policing and the impossibility of being stuck between cultures, where you otherness is all that ever seems to define you. Unlike like, David Simon, however, Musa's work is not about posing solutions. It screams "LOOK" and "LISTEN", and in achieving that aim is remarkably successful.
However, in presenting the viewpoint of the protagonists, Musa struggles a little I think in how to tackle some of the more destructive elements of their lives. This is worst when it comes to the sexism, and downright misogyny that saturates the book. Solomon, the first character we meet, has a liberal feminist girlfriend when we start, who subs in for the cluenessness of white Liberals in general, and feminists who ignore class in particular. Musa then attempts to introduce stronger female characters, and the suffering of others under sexist and misogynist attitudes is presenting the background. But with no clear POV from women, the anger that is directed towards women is never explored as an impact. Women end up feeling as voiceless to the reader as the protagonists feel to society in general. There can be a sense that marginal, working-class existence is a male phenomenon.
To a lesser extent this is also true of the violence, which plays a strong background role, with little voice for the impact of being on the receiving end.
I have lots of thoughts about this book, but in the end it is a representation of why telling Australian stories are so important. Without our own fiction, we are a people without a sense of who we are.
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