Having your world turned upside down is no easy thing.
Even if, like Jackson Sweeney, protagonist of Georgina Young’s novel Bootstrap, seemingly the only gay in the small seen-far-better-days Aussie town of Koornang, your life is hardly worth tweeting out about.
Much of the lacklustre pall of Sweeney’s spectacularly unambitious life is largely his own fault; he works six hours a week at Al’s Takeaway but only because the owner has some affection for Jackson’s mum who worked there in her youth, and he approaches with a well-honed, near-acidic cynicism that accords nothing and no one any real worth or enthusiasm and which for all its carping about life’s deficiencies, never spurs the malcontent young gay man to do anything to remedy the source of his much complained about ills.
So, you’d think Jackson would be thrilled for a break from finding some guy, any guy, he hasn’t pashed yet in Koornang or the slightly less depressing larger nearby town of Ginsborough, but when the titular Bootstrap turns up, all leather trench coat, long black hair and taciturn replies, and sweeps Jackson up in an extraordinary adventure, his reaction isn’t quite what you might expect.
Or perhaps it is; he is both angered and bemused by Bootstrap’s propensity for appearing and disappearing like magic, especially on the night when Jackson almost saves a girl from being robbed, a heroic act that Boostrap, completely improbably, says he already knew would happen and that he was here to witness.
“Changed like a lot of things after I was kicked outta the closet by Reese Jeffry, that time years ago back he caught me pashing his cousin at Johnnie’s New Year’s piss-up. It riles me right up to this day that I didn’t have the balls to rip into them when I could’ve. They were the ones that dropped me, same as half the town did. Whip-crack wildfire it was. The way people suddenly changed the way they spoke to me, the way they were to me. At school, down the street, wherever.” (P. 3)
How on earth, reasons Jackson who long ago lost any sense of imagination or possibility, if he ever had it in the first place, could someone know that the events of that wildly dramatic night were about to take place?
After all, nothing happens in their godforsaken patch of country Australia, and if you were to wait around for anything to happen, you’d be waiting a good long while surely; even so, Bootstrap is there to watch Jackson become a hero which he duly does.
But how did Bootstrap know that was going to happen? And how on earth has Jackson’s equally beleaguered bestie, who had escaped to Melbourne to study at uni with the love of her life only to find he didn’t love quite as much as she thought and who’s back reluctantly in Koornang with family, caught up in what becomes a very strange adventure indeed?
Jackson has questions, oh, he has questions, and as Bootstrap finally admits he’s on the run from someone or something in the future, and that’s he’s a time traveller – how does a cynic handle such an outlandish tale? Much of Bootstrap‘s engaging sense of dark fun comes from watching Jackson grapple with events that his soured worldview deem utterly impossible – Jackson finally has to confront has to confront the fact that maybe the world, here and now, and palpably not, is far bigger and epic than he ever imagined.
And that perhaps, just perhaps, caring about someone (other than his mum), may not be the worst thing to ever happen to him.
In Bootstrap, Georgina Young has craft a brilliantly adventurous story that for all its beautifully rendered outlandish aspects, is very much grounded in a peculiarly Australian sense of stuck personhood.
It exists in a place where dreams have stalled and hopes have died, or are on life support, and where the idea that time travel is not simply possible but is happening to you, is fanciful even as you zip from the era of dinosaurs to Koornang at various stages of its blighted development.
Young brings the fantastical and the banal together with extraordinary impact, crafting a story that is as much about what happens to life when it loses all sense of shape, purpose and meaning right before you, as it is about how someone can come from the future and change your world utterly and completely.
Imbued with a glorious romantic queer sensibility that awakens something in Jackson that he didn’t know he had, and that he comes to treasure more than anything in the world to his considerable, cynicism-busting surprise, Bootstrap is a rollicking adventure across, starkly divergent realities and into a humanity that unites all the characters in a bonding, unifying commonality that comes to play a pivotal in its final devastatingly intense but reassuringly hopeful and emotional final act.
As stories go, the one in Bootstrap, is a doozy, bringing together genres in a way that make you gasp at the sheer audacious imagination of it all, and sigh at the fact that love, actual, self-sacrificial, change-the-world love, can exist in a place that seems, to Jackson at least, to be utterly inimical to it.
“I can feel Ben join me, He stands close enough that I don’t think his girlfriend would be impressed. Close enough it’s distracting. I focus, strain my ears, but it doesn’t sound like anyone’s there. Just Langrick murmuring to himself while he fiddles with the transporter.
‘Jesus. May need a bit more work. Better than what we’ve been working with. It’ll work. It has to. We’re here and I was there, so … so, we’re good.’
Ben’s mouth is achingly close to my ear. ‘He’s a nutter, Marn.’
I close my eyes, refuse to agree. ‘He’s our only way out of here.'” (P. 209)
What makes Bootstrap such an arresting read is that somehow Young manages to plant the pedal to the metal and takes us on a wild ride across time and space while giving the more intimate aspects of the story a chance to breathe.
It’s an extraordinary, affecting and oft-times funny feat that means that the novel never quite goes or does what you think it’s going to do, and even when it does, it twists and turns in ways that make you gasp surprise and swoon with the impossibly lovely humanity of it all.
Even better, it mixes in a blighted Australian country landscape and a jocular sense of disillusioned black humour meaning that while there is a gee-whiz factor very much at work here, it’s more than leavened by a sense that people remain people, good vs. evil, flaws and foibles and all, even as technology gives them a chance to romp across the vast spread of time which by the way does not begin to behave in the way you think it might.
That upending of what we know about time, largely from popular culture to be fair, is but one subversive delight in a novel that happily plays havoc with tropes, cliches and expectations, a giddy orthodoxy-challenging sensibility that means Bootstrap is not your average sci-fi novel, happily darting and dashing here and there, all the while giving Jackson and Bootstrap, who find love where neither saw it coming, and Marnie, who finds out maybe the world is as small and dark as she thought, a chance to discover that maybe there’s more to be human than they ever cynically thought.