No One
John Hughes
UWA Publishing, 2019
This strange and unsettling novel begins with its protagonist driving and hitting something on Lawson Street, outside Redfern station. When he returns later, the blood on the road convinces him it really happened. But where is his victim?
The narrator of No One is an orphaned Arab immigrant farmed out to foster parents in Cessnock, Broken Hill, and greater Sydney who never quite finds his place or way.
In adulthood, he’s a wanderer. A troubled commentator on the wounds this country has inflicted on its Indigenous people and the alienation encountered by its migrants and refugees.
He combs the streets of Redfern, Glebe, and Surry Hills trying to find the person he believes he’s knocked down – restless, guilty.
Always guilty – says the Poetess, an Aboriginal woman, whose facial scars are like worm trails. And, it’s true, his guilt is viscid and disproportionate – although not if we see it as the nation’s guilt he carries. (And well we might, given that the publisher’s blurb says this is a story about “guilt for acts which precede us, crimes we are not sure we have committed, crimes gone on so long they now seem criminal-less”.)
“Fuck healing. Stop wounding,” is what the Poetess says of Australia’s insistent talk of “healing” for its Indigenous people, and it’s a good point.
Her speech about why she won’t go to the hospital after she’s been glassed in the face yet again is also as pertinent and political as they come.
So much in the protagonist’s world seems impermanent. The paintings on a cave wall. The handprints on his neck from being almost strangled. The Rachel Forster hospital part-demolished – its insides open to the elements, wasting away.
Towards the end of the novel he says his life is a hospital – which isn’t a description I fully understand. Is it that each of the many emergency departments he visits is a gathering place of the desolate (ruinous, anti-social, lonely) and this is the kind of desperation he feels?
A disturbing and disorienting book, No One left me very unsettled. If I can shake this feeling I’ll probably read it again – focusing on absorbing the eloquence of Hughes’ sentences and looking for a unifying element.
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