Review: 1985, by Dominic Hoey

Dominic Hoey’s gambit is wide - at various points throughout his career he’s been an agitator, poet, rapper, playwright, critic, DJ, teacher, performer and, increasingly, a novelist of note.

For Hoey, and for many of his characters, the struggle is real. With little formal education, his experiences with a debilitating bone disease and dyslexia have deeply influenced his work, leading him to advocate for the neurodivergent and the marginalised.  He's said that 'if you’re poor, working class, neurodivergent, disabled or not formally educated, it really feels like you’re not part of the club.'

His second novel, Poor People With Money (his first major publisher Penguin) was, for this reviewer, the standout literary novel of 2022. The lead, a female, bartender-come Muay Thai fighter, was a perfect fit for Hoey’s brash, and often comic, take-no-prisoners approach.

Despite its title 1985 is no dystopian update of Orwell. It's an electric coming-of-age tale, taking place 'between town and the Waitākeres', but mostly in and around Auckland’s Crummer Road. Everything readers have come to expect from Hoey is here. 1985 is acerbic, questioning, political, sometimes sentimental, based on hard won experience, and - a trait little seen in local literature - often very funny. 

The novel begins on the day New Zealanders find out about the Rainbow Warrior bombing. Obi, our pre-teen narrator, and his family listen to the news on the radio. Mum and Dad are ex-heroin addicts - the latter a would-be poet, who throws his work away as soon as he’s read it - 'all bones, skin and denim, bound together with tobacco stains', and Mum is sick from hepatitis. It's set in a pre-gentrified, multicultural Grey Lynn and for the family it’s a rugged, hardscrabble existence.  Obi’s dinners occasionally consist of half a packet of Refresh he finds under the couch. Petty crime and violence are everywhere, and, as his book-loving, once A-student mother observes, everyone around them are 'Einsteins at ruining their lives.' At one point, Obi asks if they shouldn’t just run away.

'Where are we going to go?' she replies. 'The car’s fucked and no-one’s got a job.'

Then a bank letter arrives warning that unless arrears are paid the bank will take their house which is the family’s only asset, bought with drug proceeds in the 70s. Obi finds a map in an ex-crim’s things which he hopes will lead to an illicit cash windfall. Will Obi’s efforts somehow save his family or will his father’s rash decisions doom them?

Hoey captures the time and place in perfect detail. The broad outlines of the story mirror details unveiled in the author's previous work, and the characters are fully formed, alive on the page, with every interaction feeling realistic and lived in. Dysfunction exists alongside the undercurrent, especially in the relationship between Obi and his mother.

'I don’t want you getting into dumb shit like those men out there,' she tells him. 'There’s no happiness in that life, just an endless celebration of pain.'

1985 establishes Hoey as one of our finest contemporary storytellers; one who gives voice to those rarely heard in our literature. For too many years Hoey’s work reached few beyond his dedicated fans - and those years of struggle are palpable in every page of this brilliant, funny and heartbreaking novel. It speaks to the redemptive quality of art, the vicissitudes of family and the harsh realities for those on the margins. A magnificent achievement. Reviewed by Greg Fleming