The Last Thread by Michael Sala

Title: The Last Thread

Author: Michael Sala

Publisher: Affirm Press 

Publish date: 2012

ISBN: 978 0 9871326 8 0

‘One of Michaelis’s fingers gets wedged between concrete and metal and splits open. He screams. The go-kart stops and he sits there, staring at the wound. (…) A curled leaf of skin hangs from his finger. The tears do not come straight away. The blood holds back. Both come out at once, and then he can’t stop. He is bleeding and wailing like he was made for it. (…)

The tomatoes are swollen and dark and red. Mum runs a knife along each one, before she drops it into boiling water. A thin cut in the flesh, barely visible. The skin of the tomato unfurls when it hits the water, like a flower blooming.’

This is the autobiographical story of a migration and re-migration from the Netherlands to Australia, back again to the Netherlands, and back again to Australia, from the viewpoint of a child of Dutch-Greek heritage, set from the 1970s onward. The first two thirds of the story is told in the third person, and concerns the story of the protagonist as a child. The last third is in the first person and shifts (generally) to events further towards adulthood.

By far the greatest strength of the book is in the spare and evocative language, which is mainly deployed in the third person section. The example above, where disparate scenes or thoughts are linked by visceral images into an impressionist collage of fears and pains, is typical. Most of the initial section is satisfyingly close to poetry. The spaces between the words are given exactly the right amount of room for the reader to create their own experiences, and assimilate the force of often confused emotion behind the language.

This strength ebbs rather dramatically in the latter section. Whether the intention is to impose a more ‘adult’ structure on the thoughts, to seem more detached, more in charge or further along the path of understanding, or some other reason, for me this was a disappointing development. Not only is the language less dense, but the structure is strangely confusing. The narrative about the half-brother Tomos has been shoehorned in awkwardly, with no attempt to fit it into the rest of the story. Possibly this imitates the awkwardness and immobility of the character being described, but for the reader I didn’t find it translated into greater appreciation – it was just like having a filing cabinet out of order. Likewise, the story about the quasi-stepfather Brian is spattered messily across the latter pages, leaving the reader in a sense of confusion about when exactly the events are happening. Again, perhaps this is intentional, as it creates a nightmarish loop of different iterations of the same events taking place over and over again, which is redolent of the character of Brian. But from the consumer’s perspective, it gives but a half-hearted satisfaction.

Overall, the enjoyment of language was notable in parts, and I would be happy to read more from this author. Between three and four moose-hoofs up out of five – would be a clear four, but the subject matter is a little dreary and lacks the zest to pull it into the clear.