Review: King Of Dirt by Holden Sheppard

“I live close to the end of the world, everywhere I go,” digger Jack Brolo proclaims at the beginning of this charming novel. He’s earth-moving for a highway works team in Eucla in the middle of the Nullarbor, about as forbidding a place as you might find. His mini-excavator is “the only place I feel important, even if the only thing I’m in charge of is endless dirt”. It’s hot, sweaty, greasy, dusty. There’s nothing to do but get drunk at the pub, and make furtive forays on Grindr to check out the talent that’s sparser than the vegetation. Each time he downloads the app, he punishes himself and sends up a prayer at the roadside cross. Not just for the urges the app enables, but for what it knows: “the damn thing remembers me … every part”.

To be known completely; it’s a terrifying prospect. Jack is on the run from a difficult youth in Geraldton, which he fled 16 years ago at the end of high school after he was outed. A wedding invitation, then a broken down ute, provide the impetus for him to return and confront his past, his community, and his spectacularly dysfunctional family. They’re so evil they’re almost camp, like Pia Miranda’s portrayal of the mother figure in the TV adaptation of Sheppard’s Invisible Boys (the ultimate revenge, you might argue). Yet at the right moments Sheppard lands devastating wallops.

Jack is a winsome hero, plucky and rebounding despite the headwinds blowing at him. The arrival of the flaming Spencer in his works crew provokes a near-fatal crisis for Jack, but then he quickly picks himself back up and begins his journey to self-acceptance, finally able to say aloud that he’s “into blokes”. Reconnecting with his high school crush Xavier and high school girlfriend Ava, accidentally hooking up with and then working for Elena, “the female version of me” — if Jack doesn’t exactly take events his stride, he certainly moves along quickly. It lends King Of Dirt a picaresque quality. If some of the characters are broad, and the story hits some predictable beats, that doesn’t sap energy from a vital story. The catharsis is well-earned, and will no doubt be a balm for queer regional kids like Jack.

This is a novel of tyranny — of distance, yes, but mainly of the patriarch. The violence Jack endures originates with fathers, with God the father of all fathers (Sheppard gets plenty of mileage out of some cinematic wordplay). Through his dad he’s descended from a line of violent Sicilian men, beginning with a great-grandfather who was said to have murdered an enemy with a rock to the skull. It’s the stuff of family legend, but Sheppard carefully exposes the harm hiding in the mythology. “If my father’s hurting me,” he says, “My bones tell me I must deserve it. Like he has the authority to do this to my body cos he’s my dad.” Later he imagines “if every man in the world had a dad who was best mates with him … I guarantee that world would be a utopia.” Fortunately he learns his worth is not determined by what his family believes, and some of the novel’s most beautifully drawn scenes see people offering a hand to Jack when he needs it most.

“Just cos I don’t talk a lot doesn’t mean there isn’t a lot going on in my melon,” Jack tells us, and indeed he has plenty to say on the page, frequently hilarious. This is a celebration of boofheadedness (“better to be a boofhead than a dickhead”); Jack wears his Akubra and Pit Vipers with all the pride of a rainbow flag in Mardi Gras. King Of Dirt is as hot and sweaty as the Nullarbor in January. Although the true love of Jack’s life may be his black SS Commodore, Phantom, subject perhaps to the novel’s most erotic gaze, there are plenty of other rendezvous that are horny and amusing (Jack memorably describes one motel hookup as “like trying to fuck a waterslide with a chippolata”), demonstrating that although coming out can be a worthy aspiration, there’s plenty of fun to be had down low. In the real world, this kind of masc-for-masc often comes with its fair shake of femmephobia (of the kind a Jack initially throws at Spencer), but here it offers a different, more playful shade of masculinity to the one demonstrated by Jack’s father. It really is all performance in the end, so you might as well revel in it. Long live the kings.

Gay rating: 5/5 for gay characters, relationships, themes and explicit sex.