(courtesy The Fremantle Press)
Reinventing your life is no easy thing.
Oh everyone dreams of Eat. Pray.Love.-ing the hell of their tired, meaningless or traumatically disrupted lives, but dreaming of it happening is far easier than taking the concrete steps necessary to manifest it in the real world.
But sometimes circumstances prevail that force you to take steps that might otherwise be defeated by inertia or fear, and you are catapulted into a new life with little planning, perhaps too much alcohol and not enough impulse control and you find yourself having to ride the rapids to a new life, holding on by the seat of your pants.
One person who knows precisely what this is like is the protagonist of The Montegiallo School of Swearing by Andrew HC McDonald, English teacher Brian Chapman, a Melbourne-based educator who is dealing with the very messy aftermath of a divorce from a fellow educator and who finds himself all at sea and completely unsure of what his next step should be.
We’ve all been there at one point or another but what you likely haven’t done late one night is purchased, after way too consoling alcohol with your best friend from childhood, Toby, a one-euro sprawling village in a sleepy village in the centre of Sicily.
OK, well easily reversed; just tell them you’ve changed your mind and want to cancel the purchase which is all easily done as long as you haven’t paid the non-refundable 5000 Euro bond.
OOPS …
Brian would have disappointed if the door had not creaked spookily as it opened. Viviana pushed it wide and strode straight in. Franco gestured for him to follow her, and he stepped into his new home.
So, suddenly Brian finds himself the owner of a home in faraway Italy, one that will require a lot of expensive renovation which will need to be tackled on a $38,000 budget and with the aid of a very old edition of Personal Italian Grammar and with no clue about his future will look like.
It’s daunting, and Brian, like any sane person would, wildly thinks of ways to get out of this seemingly impossible situation; but then something shifts and he realises that as a man in need of urgent reinvention, he needs some sort of plan so why not this ill-thought out birthed in a drunken sea of alcohol and all the poor judgement that comes with it?
It’s not like he has any other viable options.
The aim is to make himself into Brian 2.0, a man who can orchestra a seamless home renovation, who can become a part of his community in a village where the rest of the one-Euro expats see no need to bother (to the understandable ire of the Italian villagers) and who can fashion a life full of love, friendship and satisfactory outcomes.
Of course, life being life, things don’t quite out that way but rather being some sort of crosscultural comedy of slapstoick errors, what McDonald crafts in The Montegiallo School of Swearing is a delightfully charming story of one earnest man who decided to make the most of his unexpected life change, and who finds that while ambition doesn’t always meet actuality, that maybe, just maybe, things might turnout okay, after all.
(courtesy The Fremantle Press)
The fact that The Montegiallo School of Swearing is a sweetly nuanced and at times gently heartfelt of one man scrambling to find a way out of the morass his life has become, and in another country to boot, doesn’t preclude there being some hilariously over the top moments.
For every moment of authentic connection between Brian and a local, and every step forwards he makes (to be honest, backwards is more in the ascendancy than forwards) in wooing local real estate agent Viviana Messina who is a glamorous force of nature and not easily impressed, there are other times where everything goes horribly and laughably wrong.
You can take your pick of rampantly over-the-top moments, such as when Brian’s accidental swearing-inclined English language classes take off and remake Montegiallo in a whole new, far less conservative image, or when opposing groups weaponise swearing to choatic effect, but The Montegiallo School of Swearing is full of gleefully funny scenes where one misstep leads to all sorts of tremendously amusing and messy consequences.
For all of its comedic richness, what really sets the novel apart is how much heart sits at the centre of its storytelling.
McDonald seamlessly brings just the right amount of vulnerable humanity into the often very funny narrative and in so soing, gets to have his comedic cake and real emotional impact too.
Early the next morning he [Brian] crept down to the market area, hoping to get into the supermercato before the real estate opened. He poked his head around the corner. No Mercedes. He was in and out of the shops in a few seconds and almost ran back up the hill, dragging his trolley behind him like a broken anchor.
You are carried along in The Montegiallo School of Swearing by a lovely sense of life being remade, biut slowly and with bumps and bruises, obstacles and challenges, just as would happen anyone’s life.
The path to renewal and redemption is rarely a straight or easy one, and McDonald doesn’t pretend otherwise, and while again, much comedic gold is mined from Brian’s unorthodox new life choice, there’s also a lot of very real humanity brought forth too, which means you are incredibly emotionally invested in what happens next, every bit as you are smiling to yourself a great deal and laughing often.
The Montegiallo School of Swearing is an absolute gem of a novel, a warm loving story that knows how absurdist life can be and how, despite our best efforts to aim for the stars, we often end up in mud-filled trenches, but which refuses to wave the white flag of surrender.
Does Brian perfectly integrate in his new Italian home? Not exactly. And do his efforts to renovate his home and capture Viviana’s go smoothly and as planned? That would be a no.
BUT, and this matters a great deal in a grounded novel that might exaggerate for comic effect but never at the expense of wearing its empathetic heart very much on its sweetly-written sleeve, it doesn’t matter if Brian gets it right most of the time because he’s earnest, he means well and he wants his new life to be good, and so it eventually is in some altogether wondrously good ways.
The getting there, though, is what takes up most of the story in The Montegiallo School of Swearing and it is funny and heartfelt and gently embracing and you will smile, you will sign and you will identify with Brian as he tries to make good on his rash decision, even if it demands more of him that he ever could have expected.