A novel about surfing: The Life by Malcolm Knox

Monday 8 August 2011 10:05AM (view full episode)

Malcolm Knox talks about his latest novel The Life.

The Life tells the story of DK -- Dennis Keith -- once a Coolangatta legend, a world champion surfer, loved and feared in equal measure. Now DK is a broken man, living with his adoptive mother, Mo, in a Gold Coast retirement village. He's an overweight, middle-aged recluse, who makes a daily walk to Bob's milk bar for his pine lime splice hiding behind aviator sunglasses, pushed high up on the nose.

Until his routine is disturbed by the BFO -- the 'Bi Fricking Ographer', who starts asking questions about the past.

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Peter Mares: When I was a kid my favourite ice cream was a Pine Lime Splice, a treat after some swimming lessons, which needed to be rewarded since I was a bit afraid of the water. The image of a dripping Pine Lime Splice adorns the cover of The Life, the latest novel by Australian writer Malcolm Knox.

The Life tells the story of DK, Dennis Keith, once a Coolangatta legend, a world champion surfer, loved and feared in equal measure. Now DK is a broken man, living with his adoptive mother, Mo, in a Gold Coast retirement village. He's an overweight, middle-aged recluse, who makes a daily walk to Bob's milk bar for his Pine Lime Splice, hiding behind aviator sunglasses, until his routine is disturbed by the BFO, the 'Bi Fricking Ographer', who starts asking questions about the past.

The Life is the fourth novel by Malcolm Knox who's also written several works of non-fiction. Malcolm Knox, welcome to The Book Show on ABC Radio National.

Malcolm Knox: G'day Peter, thanks for having me.

Peter Mares: Do you surf?

Malcolm Knox: Well, when you talked about yourself with your soft-top in the whitewater I was thinking, yes, there I am, we can be there together. I do surf, I'm a really bad surfer, and I haven't surfed for that long, only about eight years now, but I work hard at it and I try my best.

Peter Mares: I think you're probably a lot better than I am. A soft-top, for those who don't know, we know it here as a G-board, I don't know if that's a Victorian name rather than a New South Wales name, but they are nice and floaty for beginners, aren't they.

Malcolm Knox: It's part of your rite of passage. I gave surfing a crack when I was a kid, and what that crack consisted of was a mate saying, well, here's my board, have a go on a wave. And of course his board is a tiny little fibreglass feather. I have one go at it, fall off, and say that's too hard, and give it back to him. The turning point for me was when I was 37 my wife gave me two surfing lessons for my birthday, and a mate said, well, nice present but you're never going to see him again. And I started out on those beginner soft-top boards, which I think have revolutionised surfing because they make the initial experience of standing up so easy, that I was immediately hooked. And over the ensuing years I went up from once a month to once a week to now I probably surf...and talk about wasted youth, I've got a wasted middle age, I probably surf about four or five times a week now.

Peter Mares: Well, as I say, youth is wasted on the youth, so you may as well be enjoying it now. This is a fascinating novel because it comes entirely out of the main character's head, DK's head, narrated at times in first person and at times in the third person but always in DK's voice. Was it hard to sustain that voice?

Malcolm Knox: That is a question more about the writing process than the act of creating that voice, because I heard the voice, I heard it around me and I heard reverberating in my head, and the first draft I wrote was an honest attempt to get that voice.

Peter Mares: Where did you hear it, where did it come from?

Malcolm Knox: In the surf basically, around me, and not only the surf, it's just the Australian male that I've always been surrounded by since I was a kid. Even though I come from an educated middle class background, when I'm talking with my friends we sort of communicate in grunts and silences, the music of the un-said, and that was the Australian voice that I'd always heard about me. I know that there have been certain people who've done it on the page, but there was a newness about it, about the surf voice I was hearing, and I just wanted to trap it, you know, like lightening in a bottle.

Peter Mares: It's a very poetic voice in its way as well, it's a kind of prose poetry almost, DK's voice. I think Fiona Capp, who is a surfer as well, she calls it half-demotic poetry.

Malcolm Knox: I'm not a poet and I don't think I understand poetry very well, so I am being falsely elevated to a craft that I'm a complete dunce at, to be described in that way. But I do think there is a kind of a natural demotic poetry in the way we talk. I'm always made conscious of it when I'm speaking with friends of mine from other countries, particularly from America and the UK, and they mimic me in fun, the way I talk, and there are these tics that...you know, the sentences that you start and you don't quite finish, or you half made your point and you say, 'Yeah, so...' and that's the end of it, and they always laugh at me for this. That was the kind of voice I wanted to get...

Peter Mares: And the 'Yeah, but no', which is DK's signature line, but it's a common...it's an Australianism, isn't it to say, 'Yeah but no.'

Malcolm Knox: Yes, and I had a character who said 'yeah no' all the time in my second novel A Private Man, and people would say at the time, you hear that all the time from everybody, 'yeah no', and I've never seen it on the page before, it seemed a bit startling to see it in the written language.

Peter Mares: But there's more than...obviously you're capturing spoken language and putting it on the page, but there's also deliberate mantra-like repetitions, word association, so you're playing very deliberately with language, aren't you.

Malcolm Knox: Yes, and that pretty much comes from the character of DK, because of his various...I don't even like to put a name on his psychiatric tics and pseudo-conditions that he is carrying around with him, but that's him, that repetition. I didn't try to write the book in waves. I've seen it described that way, that there are sort of waves of words and there is a certain amount of repetition in that wave-like pattern. But the deeper I was inside his head, the more I was thinking, well, this is his element where things repeat ever so slightly differently each time, and come in a soothing wave-like pattern. So it just seemed to be him.

Peter Mares: As readers then we have to build up the story out of these fragments in DK's head, seemingly or apparently at first disjointed thoughts which gradually start to form a picture. It's a bit like a jigsaw coming together, and in fact you use the metaphor of a jigsaw puzzle quite a lot in the novel.

Malcolm Knox: Yes, that's one of DK's hobbies, doing jigsaw puzzles, and he gets into a bit of trouble when his brother hides one of the pieces from him. But I think it's one of those books, and I've read enough of them to have suffered through this thing of...it doesn't quite make sense when you're first reading it and there's a bit of a hump to get over initially, but that's what learning a language is like. It's a book where I wouldn't be surprised...everybody who says to me, gosh, I found the first ten pages really hard to get into, I think, sorry but that's just the way this guy talks, this DK talks, but if you can get through that, all of a sudden you're speaking his language with him. And that's the common response, that after that initial hump people can't get out of him.

Peter Mares: So you knew you were taking a risk then, in writing in this way?

Malcolm Knox: Yes, it's always a risk. If you're not writing a fantastic first page that just takes the reader immediately, it's inherently risky.

Peter Mares: But you are dropping in these pieces of the jigsaw puzzle quite early on, and there's a line 'the girl in the fibreglass', we have no idea what it means and I'm not going to say what it means because that would give away too much of the story, but you are giving us hooks, aren't you.

Malcolm Knox: Yes, I don't want to think of myself as an unhelpful writer. Quite a big influence on me before I started writing this book is a UK author called David Peace, and his books are also written in a very...often in a Yorkshire demotic, and hard to get into, quite long books but really fast as well. And I wanted to create a pace similar to what David Peace achieves, which is something that is quite dense and a lot of new language in it, but also moves fast.

Peter Mares: There is a lot of pace in the novel, and in fact you've got two strands of story. We've got on the one hand the arrival of the BFO, the 'Bi Fricking Ographer', who starts asking questions in the present, and on the other DK's reminiscences from his beginning surfing and looking back over his life and moving through time. And these two stories are heading for each other, aren't they, we can see that they're going to connect or crash into one another.

Malcolm Knox: Yes, I think the question you're asking at the beginning is how did he get from there to here, and that's probably why you keep reading initially. And then another layer intrudes which is a crime that you find out is committed, and of course you're reading to find out who done it. And then there's the mystery of the BFO as it becomes apparent through a series of hints that she is not quite who she makes herself out to be.

Peter Mares: How did you come up with that term, the BFO?

Malcolm Knox: I don't know. I've heard there's a Roald Dahl DFO or something...

Peter Mares: No, BFG, the Big Friendly Giant...

Malcolm Knox: Yes, right, that's one of the things you learn about yourself when you read other people writing about yourself, and I might have read that when I was a kid, I can't remember how much Roald Dahl I read. I don't know Peter, it's just sort of spraying into my head that this guy wouldn't call her a biographer, he'd call her a 'Bi Fricking Ographer'. And on that point, with that Australian male surf grunt in real life, it contains a lot of swearing, and one thing I wanted to do, more or less by making the bar a little bit harder for myself, was have DK as a person who does not swear. And I thought yes, first of all that's him because there is a gentleness to him, and also because I thought if you take every swearword out of that Australian language, you're creating a vacuum that something else has got to flow into, and I was really intrigued by what would go into that . Of course he does the odd 'fricking' but that's as far as he'll go, otherwise he needs to use what words he has without swearing.

Peter Mares: You force yourself in a way to work harder and more playfully with the language. Would you give us a little reading from the novel which brings to the fore the importance of the central theme which is the surf.

Malcolm Knox: Yes, this is just an indication of how saturated his community is with surfing, and he's talking about Father Aplin, or Father A who is his local priest who becomes an important guy in his life, and Father A actually keeps and shapes boards in the back of the church, the holy wine always has a film of sawdust on the top and the communion wafers tastes just a little bit like resin.

[reading from The thing was, the waves mattered... to ...to the big fella. Yeah, religion.]

Peter Mares: I really like the character of Father A. Is he a complete invention or are you drawing on someone real or legendary in that..?

Malcolm Knox: I'm happy to say Father A is a complete invention, and I might be anticipating your next question, DK himself is an amalgam of a lot of things, a lot of people, but principally the source of DK is Michael Peterson who was a Queensland surfer, grew up at a similar time, and his overall life arc has been pretty similar to DK's. This similarity between DK and MP, as he is known, has caused a bit of discussion among surfers and people who know the MP story.

Peter Mares: Have people been critical of you for borrowing parts of MPs life and turning them into DK's life?

Malcolm Knox: Yes, I think there are some people who...maybe they're not that experienced in what fiction does, but the idea of basing a fictional character at least in part on a real person is late-breaking news. But I think if people understand what fiction does all the time, you can't write fiction without life to inspire it and to base it upon. But the amazing thing about this is I really wanted to do it in good faith and do the right thing, and I went out of my way when the book was still unpublished, in manuscript, to get a copy to Michael Peterson's biographer, he's had a biography written about him by Sean Doherty...

Peter Mares: Which you describe as the best book on Australian surfing yet written.

Malcolm Knox: Yes, I reckon it is. And also to Michael Peterson himself and his mother who he does live with.

Peter Mares: And who, like Mo in the novel, peeled prawns for a living and so on, so there are very clear parallels.

Malcolm Knox: Yes, for sure. I wanted to know what their response was when I could still do something about it. I didn't hear anything back from the Peterson's. I heard back from Sean Doherty and he said that he was fine with it, he certainly wasn't objecting to anything. But the amazing thing is just yesterday I was at the Byron Bay Writers Festival, the previous day I'd seen an article written about it and about this kind of crossover between Michael Peterson's life and DK's life, and the author of the article, Nick Carroll, had tracked down Mrs Peterson and asked her what she thought of the book, and she said she'd thrown it in the garage and said, 'Crap.' One-word review.

So I was at the Byron Bay Writers Festival yesterday, and when the questions from the audience came up, an elderly woman in the audience stood up and said, 'I'm DK's mother, I'm Mo,' and I recognised her as Michael Peterson's mother. And it was kind of an awkward moment and we were awkwardly laughing, and I said I liked her one-word review 'crap'. But she just said she wanted to talk to me outside after the session finished. So we went and had a chat, and she said, 'I wanted to see you face-to-face so I could tell you I really like the book, I'm loving it. I didn't read it initially but I'm sitting there and reading bits to Michael and we're both having a good laugh about it, we're spotting which bits are real and which bits aren't real, and how did he come up with this and how did he come up with that,' and she was absolutely fascinated by the book and finding it a real hoot.

Peter Mares: So she obviously fished it back out of the garage.

Malcolm Knox: Yes. I said, 'What about that comment? You were quoted saying 'crap'?' She said, 'Well, you know, we got the manuscript,' whenever it was, about a year ago when I sent it to them, and she said, 'I read the first four pages and couldn't make head or tail of it and just threw it down. And so when Nick Carroll called up and asked me what I thought of it, I said, well, I just thought it was crap.' But she had only started reading it last week, which is...you know, Nick wasn't to know this, that this had happened after he wrote his article.

Peter Mares: And were you pleased by that? I mean obviously you'd be pleased by it, but were you worried that she said first she thought it was crap?

Malcolm Knox: No, I wasn't worried by that, I thought it was quite funny. But not knowing her myself I was worried that maybe...and Sean Doherty the biographer had said...Sean himself was okay, but gee, don't know what Mrs P is going to think about it. So having sent it to her in good faith and then not heard back, I was certainly thinking, oh gee, probably they won't care but maybe they really don't like it. So it was a huge relief to me to not only meet but have her drive an hour down the coast from Tweed Heads to Byron Bay to meet me face-to-face, but also to get her stamp of approval. And I said a lot of the old surfer crowd aren't too sure if I've ripped off Michael's life and this kind of thing, and she said, 'Don't listen to them. I'm going to tell all of Michael's mates to go out and read it because it is so funny, they're going to love it like he does.'

Peter Mares: And it's important to you, isn't it, that you've got the language of surfing right, you don't romanticise surfing, and you use the language that surfers use, like describing waves or movements that surfers make, tricks they do on the waves and so on.

Malcolm Knox: Yes, it's interesting, on the one hand there are people...and there are surf online forums where I hear this stuff and also from people I meet, there's a bit of, 'oh, you've only come to surfing recently and how can you presume to write, to walk on our territory,' and my response to that is a bit, well, surfers have had to put up with so much crap writing over the years, probably because there is an unspoken qualification to write, which is a surfing qualification not a writing qualification. So I'm keenly aware that not only am I really bad surfer but I'm a recent surfer and have to work doubly hard to get that language right. But probably because I am a latecomer, I've come to it at an age where I have the words. It doesn't come naturally to me as an act and thinking about it isn't something that is absorbed so deeply into my character that it's just natural...and when things become natural they become invisible to you and not part of your articulate vocabulary.

Peter Mares: Yes, it's hard then to articulate and to make it real for other people.

Malcolm Knox: Yes. But at Byron Bay a fellow called John Witzig who founded Tracks magazine who, to me, both as a photographer and as a writer and also as a surfing figure, is a person for whom I have the greatest respect, and he said that he tried really hard to catch me out while he was reading the book, to just find some kookiness in my writing where I'd got stuff wrong, and he wasn't able to find any, so that was another relief.

Peter Mares: DK has an almost natural affinity with the ocean. At one point I think you write 'He looked into the Pacific and the Pacific looked back into him', but this isn't hippie stuff where he kind of is at one, in tune with the universe, he's an angry surfer. DK hassles for waves, he intimidates outsiders, he humiliates beginners and he wants to smash the waves. Is it really like that out there at the back?

Malcolm Knox: Well, that's how surfing is to me because I live in Sydney and I surf in Sydney, I can't remember the days before surfing went bad, and I know that in Breath Tim Winton captures that pre-lapsarian state really beautifully. But that's not the surfing world I know. I reckon if you're talking metaphors for the Australian character, surfing has most in common with mining. By that I mean...

Peter Mares: A very odd comparison!

Malcolm Knox: Yes, hear me out. It's obviously not a scarce resource like the stuff on the ground, but it has a scarcity because of the other people competing with you for it, it has a scarcity because of the way swell comes and goes and conditions get better and get worse. So surfers who are in this urban state are often on edge and in a highly competitive frame of mind, and they go in to surf not to achieve oneness with nature but to tap a source before the other person can tap it. And even when you talk about exploration, I think it has a lot in common with mining where old prospectors or new prospectors will go out into the world, and the first thing they want to do is find something, but the second thing they want to do is not tell anybody else about it and not start a rush to that point, and that's what surfers are like.

Peter Mares: Or stake that claim, so yes, they want to keep their own secret surfing spot secret, but once they're on a wave too it's their wave and no one else should get in the way.

Malcolm Knox: Yes, and that's why I do see this strange but deep commonality in the Australian character that built the country on mining and their modern inheritors both in the mines and in the surf.

Peter Mares: Well, they're both pretty blokey worlds as well I guess.

Malcolm Knox: They're very blokey worlds. But there are a lot of women who surf, and actually I have this friend in the surf that I run into all the time just because she is on the same flight path as I am, and I don't know her name, I don't really know what she looks like because my eyesight is not that good...

Peter Mares: And you don't wear your glasses to surf.

Malcolm Knox: No, I know what colour her wetsuit is and that's how I recognise her, or she paddles up to me to start chatting. We don't know anything about each other, but we chat a lot in the water, and that's a nice friendship. There are other people in the surf like that. The existence of women in the surf is a bit like the existence of women in the mines or in boardrooms or in any traditionally male dominated space, it's a very interesting thing to observe, to see what line women will walk between doing it their way and doing it the way that males force upon them.

Peter Mares: There is another theme running through the novel, and that is that DK's life runs parallel to both the commercialisation of surfing as an industry and the rise of surf brands and those sorts of things, but also to the changes on the Gold Coast, as Surfers Paradise becomes a developer's paradise. Did you spend a lot of time on the Gold Coast to research this book?

Malcolm Knox: Yes, I really love the Gold Coast, not so much Surfers, but everywhere from Burleigh Heads south. I not only love it for its self-evident natural attraction, and I do think it's just about the most beautiful place on earth, but to see recent history right there in front of you, it's like going to Berlin and going to Potsdamer Platz and seeing the Wall and the remnants of the Nazis and everything in this one spot. When you go to a place like Coolangatta there are remnants of the fibro cottages where anybody could live on the beach, which they could up until about 35 years ago when it changed overnight.

I did want to write a historical novel about Australia and about this part of the Australian coastline, and it has happened everywhere on the Australian coastline, that moment when one person could live right on the coast on our most treasured oceanic waterfront places, and then all of a sudden they couldn't because there was a 12-storey block of units there. And with that the formation of this book...I really wanted to get it away from Michael Peterson as much as possible and move it up and down the coast, I was trying all these different places, but in the end you just couldn't get away from the Gold Coast, it has embodied that change the way that nowhere else in Australia has.

Peter Mares: Your two previous novels also focused on sport. A Private Man features a test cricketer, Jamaica is about a team of long-distance ocean swimmers, and The Life is obviously about surfing. Why is sport so central to your writing?

Malcolm Knox: It's central to my writing because it central to my life. I've always been someone who's played sport and been interested in sport. I'm probably too interested in sport if you ask my family. But there is also a desire as a writer to do something that is both not being done and that might test you a little bit because it's not a very instinctive move to make when you know that a lot of people who read fiction in particular are people who are not only uninterested in sport but may be quite actively hostile to sport. And I've never understood that because I am a reader of fiction and I love sport and I don't see any incompatibility between the two. So I don't think I'm writing for people who are interested in sport, I think I'm writing for people who are not interested in sport and to see if the leap between us can be made.

Peter Mares: Malcolm Knox, thank you for joining us on The Book Show.

Malcolm Knox: Thanks a lot, Peter.

Peter Mares: Writer and journalist Malcolm Knox. His new novel is called The Life, it is published by Allen and Unwin.


Malcolm Knox
Australian journalist and author of four novels.


The Life
Malcolm Knox
Allen and Unwin


Peter Mares

Comments (2)

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  • Ian :

    11 Aug 2011 12:57:31pm

    : if Malcolm Knox thinks pinching MP's life is ''late breaking news'' he is having a lend. There is no admission in the book as far as I can see in the novel that it is based on truth and given Knox's role in outing Norma Khoury for creating truth out of fiction - with no acknowledgement - I fail to see how he can be so blase about pinching fact to be fiction, or at least using fact as the basis of his admittedly good fiction, without acknowledging. The irony is overwhelming. Nick Carroll, who wrote the article that they are discussing, is former world champ Tom C arroll's brother, and both are sons of former SMH editor Vic Carroll. He knows what he is talking about and I think the parallels between MP and DK are so close that it deserved acknowledgment. That's all. Perhaps the best person to get a quote from would be Phil Jarratt.
    Love the show. Ian Kirkwood, Newcastle Herald journalist (on the second last day of holiday, back at work on Wed)

  • Malcolm Knox :

    28 Aug 2011 2:20:25pm

    What a book.. my first two piece suit was a Paula Stafford in the late 50's when Surfers was a baby. A stay at Coolangatta and the Guest houses that used to have young guest on the beach having games. Surfing was new and I was a girl, we didn't do it only body surf. I loved the writing and being in DK's head, a troubled one at that.
    A very memorable journey to the Gold Coast for me. First time I ever heard the Seekers was at the brand new Burliegh Hotel in the late 50's early 60's.