Old Boy review: Story of a small life is criminally good

Georgia Tree’s book about her father, a small time criminal named Grant Tree, is exceptional.

Grant Tree, left, pictured circa 1968-69. Picture: Supplied

Old Boy is a small book about the small life of a man who was once a small-time criminal. Its protagonist, Grant Tree, served a couple of short sentences in jail for minor offences. The book is written by his daughter, Georgia Tree, and it’s difficult to imagine anyone else who might believe that her father’s small story would be worthy of a book.

I spent the first 100 pages wondering when the action was going to start — and the answer is that it doesn’t. And yet Old Boy is marvellous.

Old Boy by Georgia Tree

I read it in bed, then in an Uber, then on a plane, then at the baggage carousel, then in a taxi, then back home in bed. At no time was there anything I would rather have been doing. Old Boy is beautiful, elegiac and, at times, painfully moving.

It’s the first book written by Tree, who is a senior adviser to the Albanese government. She is a lovely writer and Grant must be an accomplished storyteller. Since Old Boy is written in the first person from the father’s point of view, it’s generally impossible to tell where his words end and hers begin (although the sentence about Grant feeling “agency” for the first time probably belongs to an earlier generation).

Grant grew up in Perth. His stepfather was a police officer and the family lived for a while in an old police station. When Grant left home, he bummed around in a series of increasingly chaotic shared houses, with friends who surfed, played music and took heroin. Grant became a low-level dealer, got caught, went to jail, came out, went straight and became an electrician.

I’m sorry for the spoiler, but that’s it.

Small-time crook Grant Tree for the Dampier Sharks, 1984. Picture: Supplied

And yet almost every page of his story is captivating, evocative and imbued with a certain kind of truth about life as it is actually lived. There are no car chases, wild brawls or climatic battles. There is barely a threat, beyond a general anomic premonition of looming doom and the sadness of chances slipping away.

The book’s ordinariness is what makes it extraordinary. Tree can bring to life half-remembered games of reserves football, in which her father played. She succeeds to the extent that I care who scored in a 1980s North Pilbara Football League Grand Final between the Dampier Sharks and Wickham Wolves — which is astonishing, since I have no idea who won the AFL Grand Final last year. Or even who played.

Admittedly Grant’s story expands into something potentially more sensational when it takes in his relationship with heroin smuggler Brian Chambers, who was executed by hanging in Malaysia in 1986. Tree writes a few short chapters as if she were inside Chambers’ head. These don’t work as well as the rest of the book, but it is courageous of the author to stretch herself.

Grant Tree as a young man. He was friendly with Brian Chambers, who was hanged in Malaysia for heroin smuggling.

I feel guilty about finding fault with such an accomplished first effort, but I suspect that Tree was poorly advised into giving the book a broader resonance by including references to contemporaneous political events. Did the young Grant truly remember reading a newspaper report about corruption findings against a minister in Sir Charles Court’s government, for example?

The book’s real plangency comes not from shared experiences of distant political upheaval but an honest recounting of directionless daily life in a slow, squinting sun-drenched city on the edge of the Earth.

Georgie Tree has written a beautiful book about her father.

Grant has obviously not told his whole story. He is touchingly brave in exposing his weaknesses and fears, but I imagine he must have been a bit tougher than he makes out. Women are absent from his memories until he meets Tree’s mother — but then, what sort of dad wants to tell his daughter about his premarital sex life? And what kind of daughter wants to write about it?

But none of that matters. There are enough movies, TV shows and books about hard men and easy sex. I was gripped by Old Boy from the beginning, and I cried at the end.

And not because Grant becomes an electrician.

Mark Dapin’s new book, Carnage: A succulent Chinese meal, Mr Rent-a-Kill, and the Australian Manson Murders, is out next month.

Old Boy

By Georgia Tree
Fremantle Press, Narrative Nonfiction
240pp, $29.99