HAMMERED by GN Braun

 

A review of GN Braun’s ‘Hammered’ by O. Spaniel Murray

 

Spliffing gripware hails the drastic ferment! These are the words that came first to mind after reading GN Braun’s genre-busting blue opus of unplugged youth. This testament to the long reach of determination survives the printer’s dream. Braun relates his days of sullen nodding like an even-tempered typist with no attempt to garner the massive headline. Lesser books open into fields of waste; this convenient work cautions a capacity for long-legged human reconstruction. Brutal though it be, the prose is underscored with tender observation. There’s lots of poppy snot and home-made medication, certainly, but also a robust chronicle of what it’s like to malinger in a cycle that is viciously repeating. It goes over. The main character keeps appealing to the now. The spacious hit. Busted swelter. Big spoons of stash. The sharp-angled connectivity of urbanites. A disagreeable landlord of the soul. This is a book that wears dark glasses.

 

All the flat lolling suburbs of the West are laid rightly bare, spread out over Melbourne’s protruding veins bereft of symbolic appeal. A few pages in and you’re already sweating. Then suddenly, there’s an episode about the car. The hero sinks into a white malaise. Carolyn quits. Mate’s rates prevail. Braun ambles back to Rochester without reflection. Everyone retreats into the habits of bitter times. There is plenty of punch among the sordid specialities, however. A tidy style never strains the cynical ovations. A terse sentence blights an opiated romance. It all goes pretty de Quincy by page eleven as the author reinvents himself in squiggles of meaningful ink as his means of exorcising various friends from hell. The reader emerges genuinely relieved that the author knows his way. Tomes of courage. Memoirs of gritty shit. Sprinkles of decay curse the young man’s growing pains. In all of that, God hardly gets a mention. It is a work without a theology of suffering.

 

This makes it the definitive account of snappy volumes in the burly grey of Ozlit, speaking in the contemporary sense and horizontally inclined. Sheer gutter balls. Brides of ordinary guys. Inspirations of rare mettle. The relinquished wonder of disposable generations. Cops for foreign nongs. Land of the big backyard. Shiny shopping malls with carparks known for better days. Scaley recollection. The author’s compact motion wins against the goblins of self-pity.  No road map is supplied. The only hero is a will for clean Mondays. Not bad for someone who spent years funding the Taliban. Throughout, the dry-mouthed Australian – always willing to see the funny side of sick - lurks within. None of the sentences are very long and the wry idiom of messy Footscray dresses casual in the long breaks. Despite the title, though, there is not one good carpentry tip in the entire 180 pages.

 

- O. Spaniel Murray