Sold (Clan Destine Press 2017) is the debut novel for Blair Denholm. Set in the seedy heart of Queensland’s Gold Coast, the novel’s protagonist is the hapless used car salesman turned real estate agent, Gary Braswell. Gary is a thoroughly flawed character: he’s an alcoholic who doesn’t say no to the odd line of coke; he’s up to his neck in gambling debts; he’s cheated on his long-suffering wife and lied to his boss and his best mate; and he’s not averse to becoming involved in some dodgy business deals. The book opens with Gary in a particularly bad patch of trouble, which only gets worse. He owes big bucks to a nasty loan shark with a violent offsider, he gets mixed up with a shady Russian couple involved in money laundering, and then the Federal Police are tipped off. Gary deals with his problems by avoiding them, drinking more, obtaining more drugs, telling more lies, and obfuscating to everyone around him.
This is a dark comedy, and while Gary is immensely dislikeable (as are many of the male characters in the book), the author does imbue him with a degree of naivety that elicits some empathy for his plight, particularly as the hole in which he finds himself gets deeper and deeper with each chapter, no matter how Gary tries to turn his fortunes around. But there were quite a few red flags in the story for me, mostly around misogynist behaviour and attitudes, gratuitous sexual violence, and the lack of agency for female characters, that I found difficult to ignore. This muddied the waters somewhat when trying to classify this book – it mostly reads as a comedy, but then there is a dash of heavy-handed violence or pornography that really isn’t funny. A generous view would be that the author has purposely written the male protagonists this way in order to present a tongue-in-cheek representation of these attitudes. The plot points are outrageous and over the top, but it is the kind of story where that is expected, and it plays on the absurdity of the situations in which the characters find themselves. But I found the lack of plausible motivations and the shallowness of some of the characters harder to ignore. I would have liked to see more development, particularly of the female characters.
The book is promoted as ‘a whirlpool of sex, drugs and real estate’ and it certainly is that, along with copious alcohol and gambling, standover men, bad debts, money exchanged in brown paper bags, and violent payback. At the centre of it all, Gary Braswell concocts an ambitious scam, to outwit the scammers, with everything – his work, his success, his marriage, his life – on the line.
Sold – Blair Denholm
