|
Lost Property
by James Moloney
This article appeared in Viewpoint at about the time
Lost Property was released.
At the end of 2000, I took a few moments to look
around, to smell the roses, you might say. Somehow I’d made
a successful transition from being a teacher-librarian who
wrote books as a hobby, to life as a full-time writer with
seven YA novel to my name. It occurred to me that YA was not
the only genre and that I needed wider challenges to stay
fresh. The result of challenging myself in this way has been
a comic novel (Black Taxi), a fantasy (The Book of Lies), a
five-part adventure series (The Doomsday Rats) and sundry
stories in Penguin’s wonderful ‘Aussie’ series. It’s been
fun, but the pull of YA has never slackened and October 2005
sees the release of Lost Property.
What is Lost Property about?
In part, at least, it’s about something that doesn’t get
much of a run in fiction for adolescents. When I took a Christmas
job in a factory years ago, an old sage informed me
that work mates never talked about two things – how much
you earned and God. The former was to avoid embarrassing
comparisons, but the latter was simply to avoid
embarrassment in general, that cringing discomfort that
often accompanies discussion of religious belief. Like
factories, Australian society only ever whispers the word
God, preferably in private and between consenting adults. Go
on, name an Australian YA novel where he gets a guernsey.
Yet, at the same time, up to a third of Australia’s young
people are educated in schools professing a religious base
and more Australian’s than not claim belief in some kind of
creator/deity.
One of the things my protagonist, Josh
Tambling has lost in Lost Property, is his religious faith.
He hasn’t done what a lot of young adults do, which is drift
away from the practice of his faith through indifference
without actually surrendering basic belief. Josh isn’t
indifferent about anything, except perhaps his unfortunate
girlfriend, Alicia. No, his atheism has come about only
after some deeply conscious searching and wondering. In
fact, one of the first things you learn about Josh is that
he is starting to use his intelligent mind after many years
of just muddling along, happily, comfortably. It’s been a
pretty easy ride for this nice boy from Sydney’s leafy
south-eastern suburbs.
But Josh’s creation of himself as
a human being has been built more solidly on his
spirituality than he realises. He’s vaguely aware of feeling
empty at his core and he doesn’t like it. His need to
replace that sense of the spiritual with something that
means just as much lies at the heart of this novel.
But it
doesn’t
provide the major story line. Where I worked in a factory,
Josh has landed a holiday job in the Lost Property Office
at Sydney’s Central Station. The research was fascinating.
Did you know that people have actually left prosthetic
legs on board trains. (No, I can’t work out how,
either.) The LPO’s boss is Clive, an otherwise unremarkable
gent in shorts and long socks whose understated humanity is
misread by Josh, leading to an unwitting act of betrayal.
Little harm is done and Clive’s forgiveness is easily
bestowed – too easily for Josh. Suddenly Clive has shown
Josh a glimpse of the ‘good man’ he needs to feel inside
himself. The boy tries to borrow Clive’s odd way of bringing
a little happiness into the lives of others and a sense of
meaning into his own, but succeeds only in humiliating
himself.
In a crucial scene, Josh rides Sydney’s late
night trains searching frantically for what other people
have accidentally left behind until he ends up on a deserted
platform, staring up at the infinity of the stars, utterly
alone, spiritually bereft and still unaware of the
metaphoric nature of his searching – that it’s what is lost
within in him that he’s searching for.
However it is
among Clive’s special hoard of lost items that Josh
discovers a clue to the whereabouts of his estranged
brother, Michael.
Years ago I shared a car journey with
a man who told me of how he had forced his twenty year-old
son to leave home in an attempt to shake the young man out
of his lethargy. I was stunned by the risk the man had taken
and intrigued by the heartache, the fortitude and the
cool-headed calculation that must have played a part in that
father’s action. I’ve borrowed this story and explored those
factors in the character of Josh’s father who has done the
same thing to the absent Michael.
Much of the second half
of Lost Property follows Josh on his ill-fated journey to
Queensland to reclaim his family’s lost sheep. Pick other
biblical references, if you feel inclined. At one point Josh
steals food from (metaphorical) pigs, like the prodigal son
was forced to do after his inheritance ran out, but why does
Josh end up destitute. Isn’t he the good son?
In choosing
the surname, Tambling, I recycled a name from the first book
I ever tried to write. It was called Hammer on the Tamtam
and it was about … well, you don’t want to know. I was only
21 then, it was an adult novel heavily derivative of Graham
Greene, but in recent weeks, with Lost Property long since
completed, I’ve remembered that this other Tambling
character also went on a journey to north Queensland. He was
seeking something unnamed but basically spiritual and since
I never got passed the third chapter you might say that he
came away with nothing. Josh goes to get his brother and the
success or otherwise of that trip is something you’ll have
to find out for yourself, but perhaps he ends up finding
what my earlier character went looking for but never found.
So far I haven’t said a thing yet about Gemma, the girl
Josh falls in love with, or Alicia, his girlfriend – yes,
they are two different people. I haven’t told you about
Josh’s band, - he’s the singer and one song in particular
helps him establish who he really is. That same song becomes
a bridge between Josh and his father and if there is one
character I’d like to draw out before finishing, it’s Mr
Tambling.
Fathers haven’t had much of a go in a lot of
YA fiction. They shoot their sons, throw acid in the face of
their wives, stalk their families, or ignore them
altogether. I’ve certainly given them a hard time in books
such as Crossfire, Swashbuckler and The House on River
Terrace – and that’s when they were present at all, unlike
in Dougy, Gracey and A Bridge to Wiseman’s Cove.
Josh
Tambling’s father is different. If any one in the story had
a background ripe for dysfunction, it’s Mr Tambling, yet I
hope he comes across as a man worthy of the greatest
respect. My creation of him borrows, in part, from an
episode of the ABC’s Australian Story which featured
Brisbane Broncos coach Wayne Bennett. Bennett has two
disabled children and anyone who saw the program would have
been impressed, as I was, at what an exceptional father he
is. In Lost Property, Josh has come to revere his father as
almost a God-like figure yet the events in the story reveal
just how fallible the man is, how human, as he makes the
difficult, risky and controversial decisions that he does.
I look forward to the way readers respond to Mr
Tambling, to Josh and to the story I’ve built around them,
Lost Property.
|
