3.5★s
“They were sketch-like oil paintings, mostly of men: some naked, some clothed, some together, some alone. There was nothing provocative or progressive, and Markus had only been able to tell that they were men because he’d been looking hard enough through the restless paint-strokes, which Georges’s deliberate hand had seemingly placed in an attempt to censor the truth. They made Markus smile. He wanted to get in between the layers of colour, where the tones shifted and changed and intermingled. They each seemed so full that he felt like if he stood closer, he’d breathe in what he hasn’t accepted in himself.”

Ironbark is the first novel by Australian author, Jay Carmichael. Markus Bello is grieving. His best friend Grayson is dead and he never got to tell him how he truly feels. Nor can he tell anyone else: he’s living in a small Australian rural town where, even in this enlightened age, expectations weigh heavily and a man’s sexual uncertainty is unlikely to be welcomed with open arms.

Against a background of an ephemeral lake, drought, water management and the Basin Plan, Carmichael gives the reader an authentic voice in Markus. Divided into four parts, the story is told in reverse, beginning with the events of Markus’s life from two weeks after his friend’s death. Carmichael deftly conveys the attitudes prevalent in a small town, and the problems encountered by youth: boredom, angst, anger, pressure to conform and, in this case, the concealment of true feeling, an unrequited love.

Carmichael’s descriptive prose easily evokes grief: “Being in that bedroom or being out here – there’s no difference. It isn’t the light that’s threatening. Absence produces a vacuum so powerful that any words spoken in it are torn apart”; falling in love: “Where are you; what are you; who are you? And why do I feel like you are my anchor? I hear you inside me, like taking a seashell to my ear”; and beauty: “He’s forgotten that Georges’s gaze is almost ceremonious: eyes like the blue light coming through stained glass and shining into a phial of holy water”.

This novel is bound to strike a chord with certain sections of society, although his lack quote marks for speech is bound to irritate some readers. A moving read.
This unbiased review is from a copy provided by The Lifted Brow and Scribe Publishing.