Young Obi lives in a decrepit villa at the lowest, flood-prone point of Crummer Rd, in Auckland’s Grey Lynn, with his teenage sister, hard-drinking father and chronically ill mother. He’s blessed, or cursed, with a hunger for escape and adventure that video games only partly satisfy – and the arrival of a sinister figure from his dad’s past sets everything on a fateful course.
A gritty coming-of-age story set against the end of an era, poet and novelist Dominic Hoey’s latest (it follows 2022’s well-received Poor People with Money) is nominally a period novel but far from an exercise in nostalgia. Hoey puts the sensations and smells of Auckland in the 1980s under our fingers and in our nostrils, as facts of life that Obi accepts with the readiness of childhood. The Rainbow Warrior sinking is humorously dismissed on the first page as a non-event, and although the hunt for the saboteurs provides thematic colour and a moment of fateful idealism later on, the signal is clear: these are people with more immediate concerns on the table.
Gus, a barely remembered friend from his dad’s criminal past, turns up after release from prison and more or less forcibly joins the household. Charismatic and disarming, Gus feels he’s owed something, and despite his obvious volatility, Obi manages to quickly get on his wrong side after finding a hand-drawn map in his belongings. At various points throughout the novel, he’s also reading Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island. Adventure is calling, but in his world of harsh and direct realities, it’s going to exact a price.
Between the aura of danger swirling around Gus, and his separate conflict with rival video game savant and local bully Les, Obi is never entirely free of threat, even when he’s sticking to home turf. He’s presented with two paths throughout the novel: the meritocratic fairytale ending of winning a gaming competition, saving the house from foreclosure and buying a longed-for home computer, or achieving wealth at a stroke by getting one over on Gus and finding his long-buried loot.
We never learn Obi’s real name, just the Star Wars-inspired handle he enters into high-score windows because only three letters will fit. It’s oddly touching; a child’s aspiration to wisdom and mastery. His ability to see the game behind the game in video parlours contributes striking metaphors to the book, a gift decades out of its time and just one example of the novel’s focus on talent and the ways it can be stymied or denied by time or circumstance.
Obi openly despises his dad for his unreliability and tendency to disappear in tough moments, but his father is humanised by his cooking and his continual stream of free-verse poems – showcased in one electric open mic performance at the Gluepot, but mostly scribbled down on scrap paper and then thrown in the bin.
Obi’s mother, a former English academic, salvages some of her husband’s efforts by mailing them to magazines. Recovering from drug addiction but wracked by related illnesses, she holds the family together and offers a few gentle but potent doses of social insight.
1985 wears its own insights lightly. Childhoods are always ending, and eras in the life of cities are always ending, too, but Hoey has taken the rich ingredients that this setting and era offers to deliver a fast-paced, multi-layered, future New Zealand classic about idealism, adventure and finding your place in the world. It should appeal as much to teenage and young-adult readers today as those who remember – or half-remember – the era itself.
1985, by Dominic Hoey (Penguin, $38.00), is out now.
