This book was read at Kalimna, Yeranda cottages, near Dungog in early January 2025.
A sense of belonging, identity and purpose is what defines us but what happens when it’s rent asunder and all we have are the vestigial rags of who we once were?
That’s the great dilemma facing James Larwood, newly-released from eight months in prison, who has lost his career as an English/history teacher, his marriage and any sense of the dreams and hopes that propelled him from his childhood home in Western Sydney to the eastern part of the city he once called home.
Penniless and pretty much homeless, James’s only real hope is his younger brother James who is the manager at a factory and who hires James as a cleaner, giving him an income, a focus and, as it turns out, a whole new network of warm and supportive friends that the old James would likely have turned his nose up at.
As the brilliantly written and delightful named The Bogan Book Club by John Larkin opens, James is very much in “beggars can’t be choosers” territory and yet, to his great surprise he has forged connections with the dimwitted and earnest and eager to learn Wilma (a man and yes, it’s a long story, reflective of Australians’ love of giving people odd yet tangentially connected names) and a host of others at the factory which turns out to be just the sort of nurturing environment James needs in this of from-the-ground-up reinvention.
All in all, I was rather nervous about book club. It would be the first social event I will have attended, never mind organised, since I was released from prison.
Bonding these disparate souls even closer is the launch of a book club by Larry which the forward-thinking and much-loved manager hopes will knit everyone together in not only the pursuit of literary riches but in the shared experience of sharing their innermost thoughts and feelings.
James is dubious that much will come of it; he was, after all, once a teacher of (mostly) eager young minds and he has considerable doubts that the expected “uneducated bogans and westies” (not an actual quote; taken from the back cover blurb) will amount to anything much.
But “this group of misfits” (back cover blurb again) turn out to be a bunch of really interesting and quirky people with intelligence and humanity who simply want what everyone else does – to belong, to be heard and to be cared for.
Infused with a playful Larkin spirit and a fecund sense of humour that pokes as much fun as the educated, if not more so, than the uneducated, landing on the sage idea that we are all the same when it comes down to it in our raw humanity, The Bogan Book Club is a thoughtfully comedic joy that carries a good deal of emotional heft in its transformative pages.
The key driver in the narrative, at least at first, is that James isn’t going to get his old life back for a whole host of personal and legal reasons, and that he needs to find some other path forward.
But a fervent reader and learner from a young age, James’s life momentum has come from believing that the future is something found away from where he grew up; however, it turns out that maybe the seed of reinvention and renewal sits far closer to home and that maybe that involves being open to possibilities he may have once rejected.
One thing James does want to do is atone for the crime that led to prison.
He does this through a number of fairly selfless acts throughout the book, all of which open him up to some life changing moments and which culminate in a new life which looks nothing like his old one but which is in fact a whole lot better.
That’s the key message in The Bogan Book Club – don’t make assumptions about people or where life will take you and be open to just about anything happening.
James isn’t exactly closed off to going in new directions; he knows that the old ways are gone and he has no choice but to embrace the new in whatever form that may take.
But as he heads down these new and unexpected parts, he realises that making something new of your life, especially when the old has been so comprehensively lost, means letting life do what it will and hanging on for the ride.
Wilma was resolute. He wanted to learn about who the Stepford wives were. He also wanted to understand why some people looked down on others and they, the stuck-up little cows that he’d encountered at the Abercrombie, were just as much a victim of socioeconomic circumstance as he and the lads were. He actually wanted to see where they were coming from. He acknowledged that it was going to be a lifelong journey, but nonetheless it was a train that he was eager to board.
Book club began a few weeks later.
That doesn’t mean you lose all agency in how your life remakes and renews itself.
Time and again in The Bogan Book Club, James has a choice to make and to a great extent, he makes them well, sobered by the backward steps of his life of old and an understanding that he needs to give far more of himself than he once did.
The centre of the story finds its funny and heartfelt expression in the nights and days when the book club meets, and while they do talk about the books that some of them read to greater or lesser benefit, the great benefit is how closely it bonds a bunch of disparate people together in something approaching a family.
One that comes to play a key role in many of their lives as they grapple with all kinds of challenges which can only be met with any sort of success by relying on each other.
It turns out that James is not the only one needing to make some changes, and the big emotional impact of The Bogan Book Club comes from the way in which James in particular but others like Wilma, Belfast Joan, Kath and Tongan Tony and Syrian Sam – the book does play with political incorrectness at times before pulling back but these names reflect real affection for the people involved and nothing more – find way forward that would not have been apparent nor possible before they became part of the book club.
The Bogan Book Club is a funny and ruminatively thoughtful delight that boldly goes to all kinds of interesting, life-changing places that will draw you in as you get to know a bunch of people who need each other as family more than they can possibly know at the start, and which will remind in the best possible way to avoid assumptions, to dump expectations and to embrace anything and everything that comes your way because who knows to what good and wonderful places they may lead?