Reading The Everlasting Sunday, I found parallels with another recent novel that explores the intense and somewhat explosive nature of male adolescence. Michael Mohammed Ahmad’s The Lebs (Hachette Australia) tells the story of a young Lebanese Australian man growing up in Sydney who, like Radford, Ahmad’s protagonist attends an all-boys school – women in both books are scarce. In a number of ways, these books are worlds apart – The Lebs is set in Australia at the dawn of the new millennium, while The Everlasting Sunday takes place in the mid-20th century on the other side of the globe. What both have in common is their depiction of the bristling uncertainty of budding masculinity.
Toxic masculinity is a aspect of contemporary culture that is endemic, but has only recently begun to be thoroughly examined. Books like these work their way toward one of the roots of this problem by telling the stories of these young men. Beyond the cigarettes, alcohol and us-versus-them mentality, the boys of Goodwin Manor are slightly out of focus. They are not particularly well defined as characters – their pasts are obscured, their voices difficult to distinguish, the close camaraderie that flourishes within this group-home setting casting them as a gang rather than a group of individuals. But this could be intentional – after all, they are teenagers, and still on the cusp of defining themselves.
The Everlasting Sunday is not the sort of book you’d ever call a page-turner – but this is not to its detriment. While the high attention to detail in Lukins’s prose can feel dense and frustrating at times, the payoff is a detailed image of each scene, with secrets that are carefully dusted off rather than revealed outright. Each sentence lingers on a moment, suspending action like frost creeping through a body of water.
The Everlasting Sunday is available now at Readings.
