Books
Night of the scarfies
by David Eggleton
Drugs, mobs, burning couches: Carl Shuker’s second novel nails the nihilism of Dunedin student life.
That kind of man’s going to be sitting on his arse smoking dope and drinking beer with those losers and picking holes in his arms?” Thus, the pained parents of Richie Sauer struggle to comprehend their son, a first-year marketing student at Otago University who has returned home to Timaru in disgrace, facing a sexual harassment charge.
What The Lazy Boys, Carl Shuker’s second novel, sets out to do is not stake out Richie as a teen monster who has been unwittingly nurtured in the family bosom, but to hold him up as an only slightly exaggerated version of the ordinary student – and as a way of nailing the zeitgeist: the mood of that first generation of user-pays students, the children of Rogernomics. These are jaded and world-weary 18-year-olds, reeling from the excesses of the it-all-feels-good culture.
Students. In the 60s they burnt US flags; in the 70s they burnt bras; and in the 90s, in Dunedin, they started burning couches. Idealism was replaced by nihilism.
The Lazy Boys is set in 1994, which is Richie’s year of living dangerously, and the novel, moving around like a handheld digital camera, is told from his point of view, as a memoir of disintegration. It begins on the day Kurt Cobain killed himself – Cobain and Morrissey are the book’s morose figureheads – with a wake that involves heavy drinking. It’s a novel that begins as it means to go on.
The rich pageant of orientation, capping and exams is here just a backdrop to the real business of homebrews, drugs and drinking games that involve kegs, bongs and buckets. Consuming fabulous amounts of alcohol courtesy of his student loan, Richie is a young man in search of himself – and so is everybody around him.
The difference is that as the self-damaging Richie gets more and more stoned he becomes increasingly estranged. He’s a student who never turns up for lectures, preferring, when not partying down in Studentsville, to hole up in his bedroom and study his paperback collection of serial killers – and then the practical component of his self-tutored course on murder looms …
For the “lazy boys” – Richie and his flatmates – laziness is a virtue, a style to aspire to: opting out is a coping strategy. (Richie is the latest addition to a long line of Kiwi lame-duck males in fiction.) Exploring the same Dunedin scarfie territory as Laura Solomon’s novel Black Light, but with way more savagely knowing – and dismaying – humour, The Lazy Boys homes in on status-anxious preppy freshers and smirking gilded youth so as to expose casual cruelties.
Trawling the depths of the baser emotions – envy, hatred, anger – Shuker reveals how even at university the long shadows of the tyrants and tormentors of schooldays loom. Richie is the outsider as freak, geek and dork, for whom striving to fit in takes the form of hanging out at the Gardies with sports jocks.
Shuker’s Dunedin is a ghost town, long in the tooth and empty as sheepskin, until the influx of students, which represents a form of infestation. Soon, all of Dunedin seems as septic as a running sore. Events on the day of the Otago-Springboks rugby match at Carisbrook serve to confirm the diagnosis. Scanning the panorama of rugbyhead culture, the novel makes pointed use of that infamous phrase of the mid-90s, “sweating like a rapist”, until it begins echoing from episode to episode.
Like a special-effects wizard, Shuker ladles on dankness, grunge and a soup-kitchen ambience to the student ghetto until it’s sunk in gluey murk. Daily life is punctuated by bonfires – of couches, of wooden fence palings, of rubbish bags – and body fluids in gutters. On Match Day, glowering youths, faces painted with blue and yellow zinc, bare their teeth at one another and move in mobs and flocks bellowing and bleating out of the mossy damp and fog of North End. The herd mentality becomes almost apocalyptic: a critical mass converging on the rugby stadium as if around a sacrificial altar.
As Richie – self-consciously drinking his way towards both acceptance and oblivion on this personal Day of the Dead – registers the aggression of the tribal loyalties assembled around the sacred paddock, so we begin to appreciate how Shuker’s splatterpunk method has produced a contemporary equivalent of the great provincial novel: reading this scarifying story is akin to being in a rucking maul, one with the energy and intensity of the parochial world it so powerfully renders.
