Jack Cox: Dodge Rose

‘An original, at times brilliant work that in its avoidance of cliché, its restorative effect on language, actually does recall Beckett. And it is more than an exercise in language; it ends up subverting the very ideas of nationhood, memory and ownership…somehow, this densely allusive, rich and unusual anti-novel retains at all times a sense of fun while remaining a gratifyingly challenging read.’ Guardian

‘There will be few novels released this year as original, daring and difficult as Dodge Rose , the debut of young Australian Jack Cox… Cox’s masterful use of language makes Dodge Rose a fascinating work of fiction…Cox’s prose oscillates between the beautiful and the baffling, the ornate and opaque…For those who want a work that tests the limits of language, then Dodge Rose could be the perfect book.’ Sydney Morning Herald

‘A wild, untamed work, one of the most ambitious, unusual and difficult first novels in recent Australian literary history…Cox is regularly capable of glorious, burnished phrasing… Dodge Rose is a book in thrall to language, to evocation and rhetoric…Yet for all the ghosts of modernism haunting the book…this is an unmistakably Australian book. There is something of the piss-take about its playfulness: half- friendly to hostile, seeking no approval. That such game-playing sits side by side with such erudition only adds to the allure.’ Australian

‘The most exciting new fiction by a young Australian in years.’ Saturday Paper , Best New Talent

‘The most singular work of fiction written in English that I encountered this year…Cox is a brilliant and utterly original novelist, renewing the labors of Beckett and Joyce in exhilarating ways.’ Daniel Medin, Judge, Man Booker International Prize

‘Cox has created in Max one of the most extraordinary narrative voices I’ve read this year.’ National

‘The story moves backwards from the ’80s to the ’20s, a dead woman becomes a young girl, and sold possessions are accumulated. It reads like an M. C. Escher drawing.’ Collagist

‘A comedy of jurisprudential, senescent horror. A capsule launched from another order of artistic ambition. A first novel that I still have trouble believing can really be a first novel.’ Music & Literature

‘One of those rare books that will absorb and reward all the reader participation that you might want to put into it. As soon as I finished it, I started reading it again…Dodge Rose turns reading into a contact sport…’ Vertigo

‘A difficult humor in a difficult — and damn fine — novel. The complexity of Dodge Rose , finally, is not a flagpole planted in a field, but rather the field’s flowering.’ 3:AM Magazine

Jack Cox was born and educated in Sydney. Dodge Rose is his first novel.

Then where from here. When the train rolled over a canopied bridge the eyes of the boy in the opposite seat opened and closed to the broken sun but he dozed on. His head was rocked against a woollen sleeve. Eliza had stretched her legs out in the space beneath his feet and now she crossed them and pressed her thumbs to the bundle in her lap. The shoes above hers swung back and forth like pendulums staccato lights between the shadows that beat through the carriage from the bridge but for all his moving parts the boy remained oblivious and his brief eyes gave back nothing but the wrong end of his reveries. Eliza yawned and turned towards the window. Before wide green plots the spokes of the canopy blew past, then they were gone.

She looked down at the pair of ripped envelopes beneath her hands. In one was a letter from the family solicitor that said her aunt Dodge was dead. Eliza was coming to deal with the estate because her mother couldn’t. I wrote the other letter, to cut a long story short. After a week in the post it arrived a day later than the solicitor’s, and so the envelope itself with its return address was a surprise because she was expecting to travel to an empty flat. She unfolded the sheet of paper faded to azure once on the train. She had never met her aunt and her mother had not told her much about her, so she was used to considering her relations tolerably less than they may have been. Dear Max she wrote back, who are you and can I stay at the flat. The sleeper shuddered. It was a clear winter morning and the air that hissed through the window began to taste faintly of salt.

Eventually the open country had given way to the suburbs and now a sharp bend in the tracks threw up the glass towers of the harbourside, and shifted them, and spun them away again. Eliza had been raised on a sheep farm near Yass and gone to a local school and rarely travelled this far east. Nothing in the window was familiar to her, neither in form nor the speed at which it altered, and when she recognised an old biscuit logo from the loose change tin in her living room it was swung past on a wall left exposed by a demolition in the neighbouring lot, enormous, faded almost to the brick. She packed the letters away and folded her arms against her chest as the banks of facing windows crowded in and the train wound up the rusted arteries to Central Station.

The boy was still sleeping when she shouldered her luggage and walked out to the platform. As she passed along the vaulted causeway she checked the bronze timepiece hanging from the rafters and found it was earlier than she had expected. She glanced back at the standing train. At dawn she had put on a clean pair of jeans, kissed her mother goodbye then stood a moment in the doorway and the older woman bedridden, breathing through a plastic mask had raised her arm in a wave that stood still as the red gums out the window, and now Eliza thought of that arm falling, in the full sun, as if she had turned up here in the interval. As if all the old years had blown away at once.

Assonance, the patchupperer, I have you at least. Before letting her go her mother had given directions to the flat that Eliza had decided to commit to memory. She took an escalator to Eddy Avenue and walked through Belmore Park scattering sticks and debris with the uninhibited stride of a born rentier. The light tumbling clear through the bare plane trees caught the down on her cheeks and her curls, assembled in a red elastic, shone as softly as an old waxed intaglio. Russian clouds hung still in the treetops. We were twenty one and halfway into 1982. One day sheep were going to make Eliza rich, but by then she was going on three years out of school and felt the need to make money and the letters turning invisibly in the shallows of her knapsack weighed almost nothing at all.

A line of nuns caught her up on Castlereagh Street and she walked behind them as far as the district court. Above its opaque windows the blue and yellow tiles of the old arcade still spelled out mourning, lace, gloves. Already the vague map in her head had begun to unravel. Ahead of her the nuns went over to Hyde Park and she should have followed them but turned too late and finished up walking down Macquarie Street towards the water. She almost ran into a milkman pushing a trolley of empty bottles out of the Mint but when she opened her mouth to ask for directions the words failed her and he swerved past and went clinking over the road to Martin Place. Eliza burned and ground her boots into the pavement. She had never been lost before. Where was north. The sun reverberating off the towers on the far side of the street hit her like a white noise it was impossible to cancel out even when she closed her eyes and the panoptic burr of the traffic made her reel again. She tried to think where she might have gone wrong and couldn’t, so in shame she kept on the way she had been going until she spotted the baize harbour winking at the end of the street and knew for sure she had come too far.