The adventurous life of a young teenager in 1950's Richmond. Not too bad. Good for the kids. ( )

This was an extremely good first novel by an Australian author.
We follow a young boy around the suburbs of 1950's Melbourne, as he tries to make sense of his surroundings and his life.
He is a surviving twin, who saw his brother killed the year before, and except for his granddad, is mostly ignored by his family and feels guilty because of his own survival.
On his explorations, he is the witness to the murder of a woman and the murderer catches sight of him. His explorations are tinged with danger from this source, as well as other dangers he lets himself in for in a child's careless disregard for safety.
His family is dysfunctional and 1950's Melbourne is highly disturbing in many ways.
Highly recommended. ( )

This novel came highly recommended by a friend whose judgement I trust, but perhaps it is just an indication of how widely our tastes diverge, that I can't share her enthusiasm.

I think I lost my way about halfway through the book after our narrator, 11 years old and often unreliable, survived yet another "adventure" in the name of mapping a safer world. I lost sight of what this book was about, what mystery I should be helping to solve. It was probably all there, just not plainly enough for me. There are some delightfully humorous passages, but I sometimes also doubted the authenticity of the narrator's voice. Juvenile narration is difficult to do at the best of times, but I felt our unnamed hero had too much latitude for his age.

I think there were connecting threads between various incidents in the story but the author made me work too hard to cobble them together. Perhaps at times I am a lazy reader.. ( )

Twohig's book combines two things I generally hate - Parochial Australian novels, and books narrated by precocious youngsters - and produces a very enjoyable yarn that I found unexpectedly satisfying.

After the death of his twin brother, the un-named narrator takes to the streets of 1960s Richmond as his alter-ego, The Cartographer. Mapping the neighbourhood is meant to protect him from further pain, but in actuality the streets and lanes hide far more complex truths. With a dash of pluck, a few other secret identities, and the creativity that only a child can bring to "truths", can The Cartographer save the day?

The first thing that struck me about this novel is the voice. Generally speaking, I find books narrated by children are terrible. The kids exist as little more than a device for the author to go nuts with exposition and simplistic prose - which is typically abandoned whenever things get inconvenient. The Cartographer is not like that. Twohig's commitment to the narrator's world (as opposed to the objective realities of 1960s Richmond) is unmitigated and sublime. It was like a catapult, throwing me back into childhood with a giddying rush and honestly, it was such a pleasure to read a book about a child, that respects childhood.

The narrator is smart, certainly. And mouthy, and articulate, and sensitive. But always believably so. And he gets it wrong, all the time - like a real child, constructing narratives from slivers of information he cannot fully understand.

And these narratives are built in parochial language without artifice or manner. Any Australian will recognise and respond to the cadence and timbre of speech that Twohig uses, for all his characters. Oft-times, I find Australian authors at pains to highlight their "Australian-ness". Characters are jammed so full of colloquialisms and slang they end up in a linguistic car crash of Crocodile Dundee, Bob Hawke, and The Sentimental Bloke. The Cartographer is not like that. People - Australians - talk like that now, and lots talked like that in the sixties. It was so genuine and affectionate I couldn't resist it.

I feel like Twohig is calling back to - and participating in - a tradition of Australian story-telling with this book. It is unequivocally a tall story, and one informed by the popular culture digested by the narrator. It's quite sophisticated in a way, calling back to a very Australian tradition, but also a broader cultural discourse of superhero comics, boys' own adventures, radio serials and more. The book is part of that discourse, yet also examining it.

The narrative is one of scraps, adventures and escapades, with a larger progression towards catharsis in both plot and character that finishes nicely. You may have to rely on its charms for the first fifty pages or so; perhaps having been burnt I'm a little ginger to trust an author writing a story like this. But once it becomes clear that Twohig respects his readers, his characters and his story it's a very fun novel to play with, and an extremely assured debut. ( )