Steve MinOn’s debut FIRST NAME SECOND NAME (UQP 2025) is part literary fiction, part autofiction, part literary horror, part coming of age story, part historical fiction. MinOn gathers together these many strands of writerly straw and spins them into a single gold thread which not only pulls the reader through the narrative, but gives us a shiny, glittering focus that becomes so much more than the sum of its parts, enough to propel the reader and give the story background, heft and context. FIRST NAME SECOND NAME is highly original, a sophisticated yet relatable story told in the unique voice of Steven Bolin, a character who will haunt your dreams (but in an entirely pleasant way).
Bolin wakes up dead from the opening page. That seems an impossibility, but MinOn is in the business of making the impossible happen. While it remains unclear how he died until towards the end of the novel, Bolin ‘wakes’ in 2002 to find that although he is definitely dead (he is in a morgue after all, with an identifying toe tag), he inexplicably has some sort of consciousness.
Before his death, Bolin had left a note for his sisters, asking them to follow a distinct set of instructions after his demise, including stringing him upright between bamboo poles and walking him home to the north Queensland town of Innisfail (his birthplace).
‘The journey will be long and difficult, one thousand miles,’ his note says. ‘Try not to be too obvious. Stick to the backroads. You’ll know you’ve arrived when you get there.’
His sisters, Carmel and Leanne, cannot fathom the note or its meaning, putting it down to Bolin’s disorientation before his death. Walk a dead body one thousand miles? Ridiculous. And so Bolin, to his disappointment, finds that he must undertake this journey himself, following his own instructions. He carries his gradually disintegrating, decomposing body northwards, pulled onwards by an innate sense of destination and meaning that emanates from somewhere in his decaying abdomen.
His journey is that of the jiangshi, a Chinese ghost or hopping vampire, walked by their family back to their place of birth after their death. Bolin’s travel northwards is not something he can control; in fact it seems there is very little he can control: he is dead but he is sentient; he has little influence over his corporal body but he is compelled to trudge northwards; he has only good intentions and kind thoughts but is required to conduct some nasty business along the way in order to keep himself going. The hard facts of decay necessitate the urgent stealing of life. Each alternate chapter is the story of jiangshi and his journey, and it is equal parts horrifying, fascinating, satisfying and compelling. The reader is cheering Bolin on as he creeps closer towards his goal, even while rationally understanding the strangeness of the situation. In the skilled hands of MinOn, this idea of a disintegrating corpse, with rotting flesh and bits falling off, does not invoke revulsion in the reader so much as a certain whimsy and optimism that he will achieve his goal.
The other alternate chapters are historical fiction, snippets of life taken from Bolin’s ancestors and the intimate stories of their lives. We start in 1878, with the Chinese man Pan Bo Lin who marries Scottish lass Bridget Wilkie (taken from MinOn’s own heritage). But there is confusion over what Bridget’s married name should be. Ostensibly, Pan is her husband’s last name, and Bo Lin is his first name, but she unilaterally decides that she prefers Bridget Bo Lin (which she shortens to Bridget Bolin) to Bridget Pan. And so an entire history of naming is changed with one stroke of a marriage pen.
MinOn helpfully provides a family tree at the beginning of the novel, which allows the reader to check back periodically to see who is who and where they fit in the order of the families that sprout from the union of Pan Bo Lin and Bridget Wilkie.
The author has a knack for writing a single chapter outlining an incident or a series of events from Bolin’s historical familial past, which is in itself a tight and contained short story, but from which springs the next part of his history in an organic way. So we go from the chapter set in 1878 to 1922 in Scotland and the origin story of his Scottish forebears, his great-grandmother Elspeth Milne and her dalliance with The Lodger. From there to 1925 where we are given more details about this ever-growing, sprawling family. Then to 1930 and on, until eventually we catch up with Steven Bolin in the modern day (well, the 80’s and 90’s). Steven Bolin is by now a young man struggling with his identity, both as part Asian and a gay man, struggles which his family do not understand (or in some cases, even know about) and which send him on a self-destructive passage of drugs, reckless relationships and self-sabotaging behaviour. The last quarter of the book is the culmination of all of Bolin’s history, culture and family and how this combined history has led him to become the person he is now.
Set all over the world but returning (as does Bolin) to his home state of Queensland, FIRST NAME SECOND NAME explores themes of identity, sexual awakening and curiosity, desire, passion, racial discrimination, cultural history, family ties, the thin meniscus between life and death and what might possibly lie between. It examines loneliness and what it means to be alone, from the point of view of many of the characters, both historical and contemporary. It questions the very purpose of life, and of death. And the ending is satisfyingly circular.
As an unpublished manuscript, this extraordinarily original story won the Queensland Literary Awards Glendower Award and I feel sure it will go on to win or be shortlisted for many more awards. It is a story both global and personal, both universal and intimate, both profound and accessible.