Welcome to the weird and wonderful universe of Trent Dalton, whose first work of fiction is, without exaggeration, the best Australian novel I have read in more than a decade ... His dialogue is every bit as funny and accurate as Winton's, his prose just as evocative, and he's better at wrapping up the ending. The last 100 pages of Boy Swallows Universe propel you like an express train to a conclusion that is profound and complex and unashamedly commercial ... Dalton's novel takes flight in a multitude of unexpected directions ... The story is peppered with wordplay, with crude jokes and gems of literary criticism ... The book is jam-packed with such witty and profound insights into what's wrong and what's right with Australia and the world. It is almost 500 pages long but I read it in two sittings and immediately want to read it again.
...a sprawling novel about a thoughtful boy’s premature journey into manhood ... As a narrator, Eli is a casual philosopher who takes in the glory and consequence of the smallest quotidian details, and his acute observations are often refracted through his singular lens of farce and surrealism ... His loss of innocence comes in narrative sucker punches, plot turns that evoke stomach-clenching terror and sickening grief ... Boy Swallows Universe hypnotizes you with wonder, and then hammers you with heartbreak.
... grim. But Eli, who notices everything and speaks in a kind of hyperactive journalese, is still somehow open to the world, and frequently amusing as a result ... The anxieties of adolescence are persuasively conveyed ... One can’t help quibbling that the story seems designed with an eye to its own presumed dramatic adaptation. The violence is occasionally too much. Toward the end, a plot point involving severed limbs is downright fanciful ... Such florid unpleasantries feel all the more gratuitous because the most compelling aspects of Boy Swallows Universe come from real life ... In this thrilling novel, Trent Dalton takes us along for the ride.
Many coming-of-age novels set in the 1980s are little more than a roll-call of pop songs, retro snack foods and chopper bikes. Not this one. This is a proper literary novel about addiction, poverty, parenting and the power of love ... you might initially wonder whether you’ll be able to take all 500 pages of Dalton’s idiosyncratic prose style; The opening chapters in which he sets out his stall as a writer of serious emotional and stylistic bravura are occasionally hard to digest. He knows it too ... Dalton has created an electric novel out of a troubled childhood. Boy Swallows Universe is the opposite of a misery memoir, it’s a lively, funny affirmation of the human instinct for survival in a hostile environment.
What makes these experiences so affecting is they happen to Eli and August, two immensely and immediately lovable characters. Almost from the first page, Eli’s lolloping descriptions reveal each brother’s stark individuality, but also a compelling fraternal devotion and understanding. They remain each other’s only constants throughout a young adulthood littered with traumas large and small ... hypnotizes you with wonder and then hammers you with heartbreak. The events of Eli’s life are often fatal and tragic, but fate and tragedy do not overpower the story. Eli’s remarkably poetic voice and his astonishingly open heart take the day. They enable him to carve out the best of what’s possible from the worst of what is, which is the miracle that makes this novel marvelous.
...[a] violent and sometimes magical coming-of-age tale ... This is Dalton’s debut novel, and he is a compelling storyteller with an exceptional voice ... [Dalton] ...writes of police corruption, but his thin description of the Vietnamese characters, as well as criminals such as Tytus and his henchmen, hurts the book’s narrative fidelity. There is a vignette of a Maori family so fleeting that the reader is left wondering where other minority groups stand in Australia ... But the group most conspicuously missing from this book in which heroin plays a central role? Addicts. Despite their involvement in the drug trade, none of the main characters use, an improbability if you know anything about the scourge of drugs ... Boy Swallows Universe would have been better with a tighter edit ... Perhaps most importantly, the book might have ended around page 353, ...which would’ve spared readers from its formulaic, Hollywood ending. Still, look out for Trent Dalton. If he finds an assertive editor for his next work, his voice will compel you to read it to the very end.
...[a] marvelous bildungsroman ... There is much more to come in this marvelously plot-rich novel, which—told in Eli’s first-person voice—is filled with beautifully lyric prose ... exceptional.
Dalton’s splashy, stellar debut makes the typical coming-of-age novel look bland by comparison ... In less adept hands, these antics might descend into whimsy, but Dalton’s broadly observant eye, ability to temper pathos with humor, and thorough understanding of the mechanics of plot prevent the novel from breaking into sparkling pieces ... This is an outstanding debut.
Boy Swallows Universe feels like a case of reach exceeding grasp. But it has the virtue of an earnest and bright narrator ... Dalton’s novel is a kind of picaresque, built around comic scenes amid the grim setting ... But the magical elements promised in the novel’s early pages, mostly via August’s non sequiturs, either get abandoned or turn out to be relatively pedantic matters of interpretation ... A likable debut that trades its early high-flown ambitions for dramatic but familiar coming-of-age fare.
