Stranger Things fans will get a kick from the time-travelling Bootstrap

Out in the wild, wild west of Australia – by that, I mean simply anywhere outside the metropolitan areas – everything is contracted. In rural towns, people are characters who speak with the clipped language of youth. In the fictional Victorian town of Ginsborough, the Aussie lexicon reigns supreme.

It’s here Georgina Young sets her second novel, Bootstrap, in a town filled with “deros” (a person with no job) and “brain-dead lackeys” (blue-collar folks who didn’t go to university and mostly inebriated) and “prize tosspots” (idiots). Here, a “piss up” is a party where everyone gets absolutely drunk, a “tenner” adoringly refers to a $10 note, “socking” means eating and “necking” means drinking.

Georgina Young’s second novel has a propulsive plot.Credit:

The town is an unremarkable dot on a map, known only for its chicken-and-leek pies and clean public toilets. But among its citizens is our hero, a 19-year-old lost soul trapped in this drab town, surrounded by the constant heckling of adults urging him to do something: go to uni, get a job, have some sort of direction in life – contribute to the march of capitalism, basically.

Our hero spends his six hours worth of pay on stubbies of VB every Friday night at the local and has to endure bigoted conservative bullies who still call him a “poofter” to provoke him. Despite this, he flutters with queer energy, and actively resists the dull authority of the ultra-masculine males around him.

Even his name, Jackson Sweeney, feels like a glorious linguistic manifestation of queer embodiment.

The cover of Georgina Young’s Bootstrap.

Like the protagonist in Young’s first novel, Loner, Jackson is floating aimlessly through life, painfully aware of being on the cusp of some new form of personhood – something older and more mature than an adolescent, though not quite at full young adulthood.

Here, Young captures the magic and dread of this period in life. Everything is heightened, every glance can turn into a relationship, every text (or lack of) can decimate your self-esteem. There is a unique, irreplaceable ennui that we all experience when we’re 19, and Young skilfully evokes this through Sweeney’s languid sense of futurity.

The story alternates between first-person narration from Sweeney and his childhood friend, Marnie, an equally likeable character who is also stuck in her own, self-defined “sad, lonely loser” state.

True, she is yet another young, white woman painfully aware of her loneliness and singledom, but I couldn’t help finding her desperately appealing; she watches New Year’s Eve on New Year’s Eve, 27 Dresses is her go-to comfort watch, and she has very long phone conversations with Sweeney about the sexual politics of When Harry Met Sally.

The characters embody a voice stronger than any seen in Loner; here, there is vibrancy and energy in each protagonist. Their personalities are more distinct and humorous, and Young’s writing has taken on a more substantial comic edge. The Bootstrap characters are more vulnerable (therefore, more likeable), the stakes are higher, Marnie’s predicament is more sympathetic, and the plot is more propulsive.

At times, the narrative made me think of a sci-fi trilogy, perhaps something akin to the adrenaline generated when reading The Maze Runner or watching Stranger Things. Indeed, there are parts of the novel that resemble a dystopian sci-fi/ mystery dramedy. The rural expansiveness of an outback setting lends itself to such genres: think Ted Kotcheff’s 1971 classic film Wake in Fright.

There is something both comforting yet repressive about these rural towns that Young captures with wonderful precision and wit.

The sci-fi element of the novel comes in the form of a fellow named Bootstrap, who is a time traveller; a man from the future, a “splitter”. He is the “Masked Avenger”, dressed in leather, charming his way into the heart of our male lead.

All’s fair in love and war, though Young’s interests lie in the former, the latter simply a means to tell a remarkably entertaining story.

Bootstrap by Georgina Young is published by Text, $32.99.

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