I read Monkey Grip when I was first trying to learn to be a writer, and looking around to see if there was anything Australian that could help me. There must be tens of thousands of Australians who have gone through this: you’re young, you read Crime and Punishment and Madame Bovary, or other books as strong, and you think: alright, that’s very, very strong. But who’s strong, who can help me, here? And the book I found that did help – not the only one, but the one that seemed to bring special news about what was possible in Australia – was Monkey Grip.

Many learned persons will disagree with me, but I think Monkey Grip, first published in 1977, was the first time a lot of hot, fresh, plain Australian language and behaviour really coexisted with literature. Plenty of books had been written by Australians and were supposed to be about Australia, but in their style, their form, they were always more than half English. Patrick White got a lot of hot, fresh Australia into his books, but he thought he had to out-English the English and hold it all in a thick, heavy modernist casing – a modernist baroque. Monkey Grip got the amounts of us and them in better proportion. It’s a plainer, scrappier sort of book, but that’s exactly right, because Australia was, and is, a plainer, scrappier sort of place. In Monkey Grip, women have a dance, go to the dunny, check each other to see if there’s period blood on their dress, and then go home to maybe ‘fuck their arses off’. But the book also gives us a sky ‘covered with a fine net of almost invisible cloud’, or children asleep, ‘cast across the bed in attitudes of struggle and flight’. There’s a scene, early on, where the main character, Nora, and some kids are on the beach, rolling sandballs, getting a bit burnt, while her friend Lou is reading from the Oxford Book of English Verse. And if you had to take one image of what Monkey Grip does, that’s not a bad one: it puts us in the plain, hot, clean here, but with the poetry, the literature the English gave us – equal at last.

But the book does even more than this. It’s strongly, strangely honest about Australia, but it’s also strongly, strangely honest about love. In Monkey Grip, Nora loves Javo, and you can always see why – and why she shouldn’t. He’s like Lord Byron and Peter Pan: a mad, bad and dangerous Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up. Javo is tall, lean, black haired, awkward and a junkie. Crashing in and out of rooms, grinning, or stealing, he’s all that is disobedient, wild; but he’s also very often just confused, poor and sick. Monkey Grip keeps so much of what it feels like to love someone even if, as one of Nora’s friends tells her, there’s ‘no future in it’. And to do this partly because you can’t bear to think that love won’t help them, heal them. Your love! Monkey Grip makes you stay and see all the bitter and sweet consequences that come from that kind of faith. It shows us the things we do that make us like an ivy, always looking for someone to lock ourselves onto. Or – of course – like an arm always trying to find someone else’s arm for a monkey grip. This honest book about Australia can also take you far inside, closer to the blind, needing self. Low, high, bright, dark: Monkey Grip is both an extraordinarily fine novel and a fucken good book.

Sean O'Beirne