Scoundrel Days is a memoir by Australian contemporary poet Brentley Frazer. Described as "a gritty, Gen X memoir, recounting wild escapades into an under-culture of drugs and violence and sex by ABC Radio National and by the publisher as "Tom Sawyer on acid, a 21st-century On the Road, a Holden Caulfield for punks", literary critic Rohan Wilson compared Frazer's ability to shock, surprise and unsettle with that of Marcel Duchamp, concluding: "Frazer is writing here in the tradition of Helen Garner, Andrew McGahan and Nick Earls.This is dirty realism at its dirtiest."
Writing and publication Scoundrel Days was first published in Australia in March 2017 by University of Queensland Press in trade paperback format. Frazer wrote Scoundrel Days as the creative component of a Doctoral thesis in experimental creative non-fiction while a post-graduate student at Griffith University in Brisbane, Australia. In an academic paper published by TEXT Journal describing the writing process of Scoundrel Days, Frazer refers to the work as a novelised memoir, written in first person present perfect . . . there is no Wonder Years voiceover telling you what to think.'
During an interview on Radio National ABC Nightlife Frazer recounted that he first began to write Scoundrel Days in 1993 while living between share-houses in Fortitude Valley: '''The very first draft was disorder manifest, simply typed up transcriptions from journals written while itinerant, hitch-hiking or on long-distance trains and buses between Townsville and Brisbane from the mid 80s. I abandoned several drafts, lost several in floods and evictions, working on it sometimes for a year and sometimes not wanting to look at it at all for months, all the while I kept doing stupid things to get more material to write about. The final draft came together when I decided to get very serious about learning how to write a novel and successfully pitched the work in progress to undertake a PhD in creative writing . . . I wrote the final sentence and felt comfortable thinking of it as finished and ready to submit to publishers in 2015, so, yeah, it took more than twenty years to write.'
Synopsis The underlying narrative arc is of rejection and redemption, of anarchy and order, hate and love. The story follows a recalcitrant boy who finds the sacred bond of familial trust broken by parents who, since their own birth, are members of a secretive fundamentalist evangelical Christian cult.Identity of cult revealed during radio interview with Sarah Macdonald Exacerbating this Amish like environment is his father's job as a police officer and his dad has an ever-watchful eye on those who transcend both God and Man's rules and regulations. The first part of the book deals with the hyperbolic bravado the author adopts to counter his social standing as weirdo and cop's son in an outback mining town in far north Queensland. He starts a gang and adopts an outlook that one critic has described as 'anti coming of age' [...] in this type of story the protagonist is far less mutable than they have any right to be. Instead, he is stubbornly sure of himself and resistant to change. Rather than stumble with trepidation through his teenage years he bypasses puberty and charges into adult situations with an unwarranted confidence.
After the family relocate to Townsville in 1984 he encounters extreme bullying at high school and soon befriends a dangerous and violent punk named Reuben, also new to town, who grew up on the streets of Sydney. After Reuben almost murders a bully in the schoolyard during one of numerous fights and our protagonist narrowly escapes a predatory pederast preacher visiting the family home, the two boys flee and go on a series of breath-taking adventures, soaked in smut and crime, walking on the very edge of life and death, up and down the east coast of Australia. The exploits and the break-neck pace of the narrative do not let up until the late 1990s when redemption comes and the protagonist finds love with a young woman who checkmates his immorality and self-destructive tendencies.
Style, technique and genre Written in a transgressive minimalist style and leaning heavily on techniques developed by Tom Spanbauer's theories of Dangerous Writing, Scoundrel Days has been described as reading with: a visceral and urgent internal perspective which is both direct and poetic, often charming, and sometimes bleakly funny, gritty with a lyrical cadence, a nervy present-perfect tense reminiscent of the hyperbolic, ugly-beautiful prose of Kathy Acker, a terse telegraphic prose that brings the reader very close to the details laid down thick and terrible, and as an immersive, vital prose that almost drags the reader along.
Scoundrel Days is marketed as a memoir, but does not use the reflective voice common to the genre, and therefore reads like a novel. It is Bildungsroman in that it examines the author's formative years and also explicitly his spiritual education. It is Künstlerroman in the tradition of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Look Homeward, Angel and Ham on Rye, as from the outset the reader witnesses the emergence of the poet from the psychosocial chrysalis of childhood, and it is an autobiographical Roman à clef novel like those of Henry Miller and Jack Kerouac. All the fictitious names of the characters portray real people, all the events represent real events in the author's life but the ever-present drugs and alcohol lend an hallucinatory quality, which challenges the readers ability to trust the author's recall. It is this effective use of the unreliable narrator that has led both the publisher and the critics to compare the protagonist of Scoundrel Days with Tom Sawyer, Sal Paradise and Holden Caulfield.
Frazer composed Scoundrel Days using an obscure literary constraint. According to Frazer's Doctoral thesis, is the first long-form creative work in history composed entirely in English Prime, a language discipline in which there are no tenses of the verb “to be”. By using this technique and abandoning the copula (are, am, is, was, were, be, etc.,), it's misuse which results in Deity mode of speech (Bourland Jr & Kellogg III, 1990), the literary voice of the narrator becomes what Frazer refers to as, Human Mode of Speech, the problem of show vs tell fades to insignificance as the narrative moves from the showing to the doing. The result is a narrative that one critic wrote 'should become the gold-standard how-to manual on writing clear, utterly active prose.'
The author himself, talking about the writing of Scoundrel Days during an interview on Radio National, Canberra (Books and Arts) hosted by Michael Cathcart and Cassie McCullagh, says he is influenced by Henry Miller, but does not like the misogyny, sexual violence and overuse of gendered nouns present in Miller's work. Frazer says he made sure that those things never happened in his writing, and says he did not want to give the readers a shocking, judgemental explicitness. Frazer denies there is any misogyny in the writing of his experiences, and says he is a passive partner. McCullagh says she was around in the time when the book was based, and asks about the genuine sexual nature of the women around the 1980s and 1990s. Frazer says the females in the smaller country towns were bored and very adventurous, and says they were experimenting sexually earlier on, as were the boys. He talks about the human drive to have freedom, and his way of life during the time of the memoir. He says he put new techniques borrowed from the world of filmmaking in his book for the more astute readers, and says he only sees the central figure as a slightly magnified character. McCullagh asks Frazer about the time when the memoir was based, and asks him to describe the narrative arc of the time frame. Frazer discusses the contents of the book, the situations he put himself into to create an exciting narrative, and the influence of the character Tom Sawyer written by Mark Twain's had on his own life. He says he stopped pushing the boundaries when he fell in love, and said his lifestyle as a sort-of teenaged Valmont had given him enough lived experience to write the memoir.
Themes Focusing mainly on the lifestyle and proclivities of bohemian artists, writers and poets in Australia in the 80s and 90s the book largely functions as a meditation on the pursuit of total artistic and personal freedom and embodies the philosophy of Oscar Wilde's tenet Life imitates Art; the living and the writing are one and the same, indistinguishable to the protagonist. Transgressive tropes abound: promiscuity, group sex, drugs, institutionalised violence, anti-socialism, nihilism, immorality, perversion and crime are the main focus and the young poet, disillusioned with his parents and the foundational morality of their religious cult, rejects the corruption he perceives in society by getting out of control. He becomes a problem. Precocious, brash, and certain of his own perceptions, he reads poetry and despises any attempt to socialise him into a system he has no intention of joining. Scoundrel Days pays homage to lost boys who grow up to be troubled young men. Frazer's childhood in Greenvale, 220 kilometres northwest of Townsville, is populated by budding pugilists, often themselves the victims of casual violence or sexual abuse. More than once there looms a drunken father as awful as Pap in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.
Growing up godless in a "deranged, apocalyptic" cult, Frazer develops a disdain for authority, cemented by his run-ins with the ne'er-do-wells in his policeman father's cells, and also the "tramp preachers" who pass through town and who have a tendency to wander into the bathroom as he showers.
Already inured to pain and violence through living next door to the lock-up where his father works as the local cop, Brentley arrives at school and his world expands, as does his capacity for observation and recall. Brentley, the outsider – the weird kid – takes all the punches in the gut from the outset and consequently becomes wary, vigilant and extremely self-conscious. He watches himself act, and soon learns how to put on other personas and slip into characters from the books he reads. Scoundrel Days examines the concepts of conscience and morality and how we form them. Do we acquire the inner voice? Or does it emerge from within, inherent, like the colour of one’s eyes? This memoir throws up questions about the nature of conscience, which propels much of young Brentley’s character development.
Under it all lies a dark, nihilist void where, like Gordon in Andrew McGahan’s Praise (1992), expectation is seen as the root of unhappiness. But unlike Gordon, who slouches towards destruction content in the acceptance of a flawed physicality, Frazer oscillates between bravado and moments of self-awareness. This enigmatic, self-styled outsider bravely lets us into the inner sanctum, which makes for a fascinating read.
Characters The true identity of the characters portrayed in Scoundrel Days have not been revealed by the author.
Other than the first person narrator 'Brentley', the major characters include, in order of appearance:
Uncle Parky
An elder indigenous Australian who is a Kuradji (similar to a shaman) and opens the young protagonist's eyes to the injustices of the European invader.
Hardy
A boy also born into the cult but is a secret member of a locally notorious graffiti posse The Heartbreak Kids and serves as the protagonist's link to:
Gigolo
A ward of the state half Australian Aboriginal street artist and leader of graffiti posse The Heartbreak Kids. Described as resembling the pop star Prince and an expert at breakdancing and break and entering.
Muddy
A half Australian Aboriginal bully and the schoolyard nemesis of the protagonist. Described as an anorexic leather jacket dragged through broken windscreens and thorny interpersonal relationships.
Harlan