The Book Tower
debut novel coming soon

For quite a while, I’d reserved a five star rating for A Fraction of the Whole by Steve Toltz. How better to start the new year than with a top notch recommendation? But now I’ve finally reached the end of the novel the number of stars has slipped to four, possibly three. The reason for this was the book’s immense length at just over 700 pages, and whilst I found Toltz a gifted and extremely amusing writer I also found the closing few chapters a struggle to get through.

The novel follows the Australian Dean family and is delivered largely from the viewpoint of Jasper Dean, looking in particular at his relationship with his father Martin. Plagued by eccentricity and occasional mental illness, Martin is prone to acts of delusion (whether it’s building a series of complex mazes around his house or devising schemes to create lottery millionaires, Martin is up for the challenge). Equally oddball is Martin’s late brother Terry, a promising sporting hero in his youth who descends into criminal activity and eventually becomes an infamous celebrity. The novel is primarily a comic one although it is peppered with bizarre scenes of death; the suicide of a teacher and his son at a cliffside school, the suicide of Jasper’s mother amidst rival smuggler warfare, Terry Dean’s own apparent end in a prison fire and Martin’s death as a seabound fugitive smuggled back into Australia. Indeed, the only character who survives without physical harm is Jasper, although events leave an understandably indelible scar on his mind.

Jasper’s narration is often interrupted by the voice of Martin in the forms of a long monologue describing his early experiences of Terry, extracts from a secret journal found at the back of a wardrobe and the opening of an unpublished autobiography. It’s an interesting device to keep the story fresh, although like many novels with alternating narrators this one failed slightly because all voices sounded the same; ultimately the voice of Steve Toltz. It’s a good voice, although at times I forgot whether it was father or son I was listening to, and ultimately (and unfortunately) I realised I didn’t care enough for the Deans as much as I was supposed to.

There’s also an oddness to The Fraction of the Whole in its depiction of love and sex, and whilst it deals very well with the lost love of a father, it deals very strangely with love and relationships with women. Prostitutes, strip bars and indifference to sex are placed liberally throughout the book, and if the male characters in the story are unusual, the female players are stranger still and I found Toltz painting them with rather cavalier brushstrokes. This is a shame, although the author can always argue that he’s mostly looking at the world through the eyes of the slightly unhinged.

A Fraction of the Whole is a gargantuan work of fiction and Toltz almost gets away with delivering such a long piece. At its best there are some wonderful set pieces and hilarious episodes. But for a first novel it’s just way too ambitious, and the last few chapters gave a sense of laziness, as if the author was tiring of the book as well. That’s a shame too, but I’ll no doubt look out for his next effort, especially if it’s delivered at a more reasonable length.

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