By James Antoniou
FICTION
So Close to Home
Mick Cummins
Affirm Press, $34.99
Literature centred on opiate addiction has a long history. Whether as memoir (Thomas De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, Kate Holden’s In My Skin), or fictionalised from experience (William S. Burroughs’ self-mythologising Junkie), it is often drawn from life. The latest Australian writer weighing in is Mick Cummins, whose debut novel, So Close to Home, which won the Victorian Premier’s unpublished manuscript award, is informed by his years as a social worker and reacts against glamorisation of the subject.
Mick Cummins’ novel, So Close to Home, won the Victorian Premier’s unpublished manuscript award.Credit: Joe Armao
Arguably, a residual glamour can be seen through a glass darkly, however gritty the literary portrayal might seem. It stalks the bohemian love triangle in Helen Garner’s Monkey Grip, and leaps into lyricism in the chemical folie a deux of Luke Davies’ Candy. Mainstream culture embraced it wholesale in the “dirty realism” of the 1990s, prompted by the success of Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting, and a fashion for “heroin chic” followed in its wake.
As ghoulish as that trend might seem, you can cut the authors who inspired it a bit of slack. The lived reality of all-consuming addiction can be dull, soul-crushingly lonely, acutely undramatic; any novel that renders it too faithfully may risk embodying those very qualities. Cummins only just avoids that fate, and the lugubrious, beaten-down, social-realist lens he brings to the theme may have some readers pining for Welsh’s more rakish grit.
No one could accuse this book of glamour. It follows Aaron, an 18-year-old hooked on heroin who has been kicked out of home by his mother. He lives wilfully in the shadows, shooting up surreptitiously around Melbourne and hanging out with fellow addict Dave and his schizophrenic partner, Samantha. He steals for his next fix, sometimes from his mother. The lows are relayed in scrupulous detail and, even when he is shooting up, there are few highs. All pleasure here is tinged with pain.
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To finance his addiction, Aaron regularly has sex with a predatory older man for cash. From the outset, he wishes death on the nameless “Man” – “all he wants to do is smash his fists into that head, over and over”. The extreme reaction is due not only to the Man’s odiousness, or even to drug-induced paranoia, but the fact their arrangement gives Aaron traumatic flashbacks to childhood sexual abuse he suffered in the care of his grandfather.
This is a character completely up against trauma. Even so, the power dynamic between him and the Man can feel too baldly drawn. The exploitation is working both ways, after all, but even if it weren’t, it would make for more compelling fiction if the antagonist were not entirely dehumanised.
The Man is not the book’s only schematic character, though. Aaron himself is not permitted to have many complicated or ambivalent thoughts about his sex work, his addiction, or the father who denies that the childhood abuse took place. Sometimes he feels less like a fully formed person and more like a sociological case study. If there is no semblance of agency, at least, there is nothing much at stake.
After speaking with his father about the abuse, Aaron wishes for his mother’s comfort and “knows that it is wishful thinking. Heroin is the only thing that will kill his father’s words reverberating through every cell in his body. It didn’t happen, Aaron. You imagined it all. Look what you’ve done to us!”
Identifying a causal trauma for substance abuse is a common enough habit among addicts, but here it feels too casually reinforced. In any case, this trauma feels so implacable there is never any question as to the protagonist’s decisions. One person’s inexorable slide into addiction may be a tragic and all-too-common outcome in the real world; it can make for an unrelentingly piteous read.
Being an addict doesn’t mean you lose your sense of humour, nor does it make you a cipher or fallen angel. As someone who has lost a parent to drug abuse, it seems to me that part of the situation’s brutality is that the fully formed person you know and love is still present, just buried amid the addiction that is claiming them.
Fundamentally, drug addicts are as capable of good and bad as the rest of us, but Cummins has created such a doomed and abject victim, it’s as if he doesn’t want to risk readers disliking Aaron, or fully empathising with him either. As such, the book contracts to the level of a social or “problem” novel about drugs and homelessness in Australia. Rather than leaving an aesthetic mark, its likely legacy will be awareness-raising around those pressing contemporary issues.
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