Eleven Seasons

Eleven Seasons – a novel by Paul D Carter

If the measure of a good book is how soon Hawthorn is mentioned, then Paul D Carter’s debut novel, Eleven Seasons, is in the top rank as it takes just six words before the reader’s retinas fix on the magic letters. Not only that, but on page 1 we also scan the names Michael Tuck and Gary Ayers, and on page 2 we read Lethal Leigh and Dipper. There’s even a school teacher called Mr Cyril – now that can’t be coincidental can it?

Arguably it is this roll call of great Hawthorn names that helped Eleven Seasons win this year’s Vogel prize, an accolade bestowed on the best unpublished manuscript by a writer under the age of 35.

Ostensibly this is a coming of age novel about a young boy, Jason Dalton, who is obsessed by football in general and Hawthorn in particular. We first meet him arranging his collection of 1985 Hawthorn football cards.  He lives with his mum in a small flat and attends Hawthorn games with a school friend and his father. The story follows him through the titular eleven seasons that make up his formative years.

He is also a gifted player and his early arguments with his mum about the dangers of playing the game initiates the conflict that marks their relationship as he moves through his teenage years. She is a single mum who works long shifts as a nurse to support them both and Carter paints a painfully realistic portrait of the tensions that might signify the relationship between a hard-working single mum and adolescent son. Jason is an independent teenager and he gradually shifts to a new crowd and new interests, but continues to play football, which is the environment in which he seems most able to express himself.

It’s a strong novel with rich characterisation and a tight narrative that portrays mother-son estrangement, awkward teenage boy-girl relationships, and the inner life of an adolescent Australian male in a truly believable manner. It is particularly strong when dealing with the dynamics of a local football team, both on and off the field, and the excitement of attending the 1988 Grand Final where Hawthorn defeated Melbourne. Plus there’s a family secret to propel the action along.

So all good you’d think, but for all these positive elements there are some gaping thematic and narrative holes. For instance, how can a book which purports to deal with Hawthorn from 1985 to 1995 fail to mention the 1989 Grand Final, certainly the most famous match of the era and arguably the greatest Grand Final of all time?

And if you’re covering eleven Hawthorn seasons, wouldn’t you start in say 1981 or so and go through the period incorporating eight grand Finals in nine years (1983-1991), including seven in succession? Or if it has to be 1985 to 1995, wouldn’t you drag it out one more year and incorporate the merger debate of 1996? If that alone isn’t a rich vein of thematic redemption to mine, then what is?  All novels would be improved by  the appearance of Don Scott.

I mean sure, characterisation and plot are important, and Carter should be proud of the stark and accurate portrayal of the pubescent male mind he presents here, but why are there not two or three chapters devoted to Dermie? Even if just to his hairstyles? Really, it’s a missed opportunity, and not just for this novel; all Australian literature suffers for a lack of analysis and narrative covering Hawthorn’s golden era.

The Napoleonic wars have Tolstoy’s War and Peace, Indian independence has Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, the Prague uprising has Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Stalinist Russia has Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago, Tudor England has Mantel’s Wolf Hall and 80s Wall Street has Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities and Ellis’ American Psycho. All great eras of history deserve to be chronicled by a novel of vision and lyricism, and Eleven Seasons could have been that book for perhaps the greatest era of all – Hawthorn’s 80s dominance. Sadly, it lets itself down by focusing too much on literary tropes and not enough on Hawthorn.

The answer for this might lie in the author biography at the front of the book, where it says that Paul D Carter, “spent much of his youth going to Collingwood football matches with his dad and brother, Marcus. “  Very disturbing. Hawthorn fans detecting only a superficial knowledge of Hawthorn find here the basis for their suspicions. Perhaps the failings of the book stem from a lack of in depth understanding of what it really means to be a Hawk fan?

I also fear that the publisher, Allen& Unwin, hasn’t helped by binding these pages in such a bland cover. Why would you have a stock picture of an adolescent looking enigmatically upwards and to the left, when you could have a photo of Dermie being helped to his feet vomiting after being hit in the first minute of the ‘89 Grand Final? Or just any pic featuring Dermie’s mullet, Dipper’s tash, Lethal’s elbow or Plats’ plaits.

Sure the cover may suit the novel’s contents, but that’s hardly the point of marketing. In the world of Australian literature, sales of 2,000 are considered healthy and respectable; sales of 5,000 constitute a wild success. So given Hawthorn has over 60,000 members, if you slap a photo of the mighty brown and golds on the front – if only for the Victorian market – you’ve got potentially 10,000 people who will at least pick up the book in a bookshop, and some of them might even buy it.

Oh well, for all that Eleven Seasons is at least a book about Hawthorn, which automatically places it in the top shelf of Oz lit. In fact it joins a rich tradition of great books about Hawthorn – Harry Potter wears a Hawks scarf, Patrick White’s recently re-published first novel, Happy Valley has a hawk hovering ominously over the action, and it’s been a long time since I read it, but I can only assume Gunter Grass’ novel, The Rat, is about John Platten.

So if you want a literary distraction over the next fortnight in the lead-up to the Preliminary, and hopefully, the Grand Final, then Eleven Seasons is as good a Hawthorn novel as you’re likely to read this year.