Image: Canva, using the cover image from The Degenerates (2024) by Mark Chu.
Raeden Richardson’s debut novel has faith in the power of storytelling. It begins in 1976 Bombay with Somnath the shoeshine, a Dalit who dreams of wealth and of sons to pass it down to. But Somnath is a victim of ‘the Emergency’, Indira Gandhi’s totalitarian crackdown on civil liberties. He becomes one of thousands of impoverished Indian citizens sterilised by the government in a drive, they claimed, to curb population growth. Somnath eventually leaves India and settles in Australia, running a chop shop on the outskirts of Melbourne.
Much later, his adoptive daughter Maha attempts to tell his story on scrap paper. She begins by writing down the novel’s first lines: ‘All those years ago, in that city by the sea, Somnath Sunder Sonpate leaned against a bullock cart, scratching his nipples, which had turned red, as of recently, with an itchy rash.’ The process brings the patriarch to life again, and soon enough, ‘his singsong sentences echoed in the basement’. When she finishes, she realises that ‘having held Somnath on this cramped page, she understood him […] the impossible beauty of a life not her own’.
This moment—the transcription of grief, the recognition of someone who was once a stranger—is the story’s thematic centre. Under a pseudonym, Maha begins to collect and publish the stories of Melbourne’s outcasts. She retells them to keep their subjects alive. ‘Mother Pulse’ becomes a mythic figure, an urban Scheherazade, bearing witness to suffering to honour it.
Richardson’s debut novel has faith in the power of storytelling.
Ginny and Titch are the novel’s two other major characters. Ginny is a bookseller and the black sheep in a family of image-obsessed suburbanites. Her father is a second-generation immigrant (surname Anton, formerly Antonopoulous) who ‘injected every cent into the tallest house, the widest widescreen television, the loudest V8 car’. Her mother is a recovering alcoholic turned wellness influencer. Titch, meanwhile, has no family to run away from. Out of cash and without direction, he moves into a dilapidated boarding house and is desperate for work. Ginny and Titch share Somnath’s drive to accumulate capital. They identify it (fair enough) as the means to escape their unhappiness and overcome their fates. Instead of polishing boots, Titch and Ginny resort to petty theft and speculation in cryptocurrency. Maha ‘writes’ these characters’ lives too.
Metafiction tends to invite play with form and The Degenerates is no exception. The novel’s dominant realist mode swerves into fable, urban legend, magic realism and surrealism. Free indirect third-person narration is peppered with Titch’s ocker and Somnath’s Hinglish. The style recalls the polyphony of Zadie Smith’s NW or Tash Aw’s Five Star Billionaire, whose characters are obliquely connected by a financial advice self-help book.
The comparison is apt, particularly because Melbourne (and, to a lesser extent, New York City) is to Richardson what London and Shanghai are to Smith and Aw respectively. They are bustling, capitalist metropolises regarded by the authors with ambivalence. For outsiders and exiles, these cities are indifferent at best. At worst, they are cruel, hungry. The ‘bluestone balconies’ of Melbourne Town Hall ‘backlit by the westerly sun, cast a cold aura across the people who left apartments and shops and slipped into the streets, swallowed in the flow […] the food and the flesh of this beastly city’.
Metafiction tends to invite play with form and The Degenerates is no exception.
Yet it is impossible to render a place with such attention and care without loving it too. The novel celebrates the local: tram routes, train lines, familiar streets, laneways, cafes and shops. A chain bookstore in Melbourne Central serves as its primary setting. An AFL Grand Final is the backdrop for its climax when ‘amber crackers flashed against the black spring sky, and the people sang, awestruck at the truth of a Tiger premiership’.
Titch and Ginny strive to escape their circumstances but barely manage to escape their city. They head out past the ‘faded Mirvac billboards selling house-and-land packages’ where the concrete surrenders to nature once again. Here, at least, there are fields of blackberry bushes, swallows swooping, and telephone lines ‘stitched up the side of the Dandenongs’. Here, Naarm’s own stories might still be faintly legible, though they are being overwritten relentlessly, first by colonisation and now by development and gentrification too. Even a place like this is destined to be the ‘site of tacky suburbs to come’.
Further out still are the ‘Red Plains’: a strange, liminal place past the train’s final stop. This is where Maha winds up, writing and editing and re-writing lives. Writing is an act of compassion, an attempt—perhaps in vain—to give meaning to what appears meaningless. She is exhausted (bodily and spiritually) when she finishes the process, but she rejoices because she believes she has saved souls. It is ceaseless work. The degenerates are gathering around her in multitudes. Every story must be told, each one holding off the unspeakable for another night.
The Degenerates is our Debut Spotlight book for September.
Debut Spotlight is a paid partnership with Australian publishers designed to promote the critical discussion of new authors’ work to a wide audience. Titles are selected by KYD, and all reviews have editorial independence.
