Reviews of Graham's novels

 

 

Sweet Time

Graham Reilly's previous book, Saigon Tea, was one of the funniest novels of 2002. It told the story of a Glaswegian, Danny Canyon, who leaves his native Scotland for Melbourne.
His life changes radically when he marries a Vietnamese refugee, ends up in Saigon and becomes entangled with the local Mafia. Reilly briefly revisits his Glaswegian roots in Sweet Time, his new and, once again, comic story.
But to say that Sweet Time is a funny book is only partly true. This is a novel that you read smiling but also nodding in recognition. There is poignancy and tenderness in the spaces between the humour. Like a good joke, Sweet Time is a story which lingers.
After the initial backgrounding in Glasgow, the novel is wholly set in Melbourne's western suburbs. Reilly was himself an emigrant to Altona in the '60s.
This becomes Baytown in the story. He describes the often much-maligned industrial wastelands of Melbourne's west with a kind of astringent beauty. This is a place of petroleum refineries, slaughterhouses, couch grass reserves and sandy scrub. It is also a place of hope.
The narrative flow of Sweet Time, at least superficially, is a classic migrant tale.
Douglas Fairbanks and his wife, Kirstin, leave the grit and gloom of Glasgow and, in Douglas's case, the Catholic church. Journeying in hope for a better life, they arrive in Melbourne in 1969.
Together with a motley crew of fellow immigrant travellers, they are inspired to set up Baytown's first soccer club. For these new arrivals football is both culturally reassuring and redolent of home. But the novel is no stroll through nostalgic sweet times.
Although historically pegged to the great European postwar diaspora to Australia, Sweet Time has a sharply contemporary feel. It points to how migrants might struggle to belong and be accepted.
The reminder is unavoidable that as much as Australia might still be a land of hope, it is also, for some, a land of xenophobic suspicion.
Reilly's sense of time and eye for detail is acute. It is part of the pleasure of the book. He writes with an easy elegance.
His evocation of 1969 is marked by Carlton being on top of the ladder, men being about to walk on the moon and the Beatles rumoured to be breaking up. Kirstin dreams of satisfaction with Mick Jagger.
Besides the novel being essentially a close study of a couple as they come to terms with a new country and feel the tug of the old, Reilly draws on the tensions migrants inadvertently and innocently present to their new communities. This, in the case of Douglas hoping to establish a soccer club, upsets the locals. And Scots from Glasgow are well removed from the surfie culture of Altona.
The ballast of the story is the establishment of the soccer club. It becomes a metaphor of division.
Still, Reilly plays deftly on his rich pitch of comic moments. Douglas's struggles to convince the locals that playing "wogball" is not all bad are often hilarious.
There is much in this story that is memorable. Douglas teaching health education to a class of testosterone-heavy 15-year-olds preoccupied with the urges of their "sperm-charged world" is pure comedy.
So too is the earthiness of the Scot's dialect and economical humour. Whereas the "cigarette cured rumble" of Frank O'Connell, curmudgeonly and licentious journalist on the Baytown Star, is endearingly resonant.
What endures in this very funny and warm take on the Australian dream is how sweet times can come from the most unlikely situations. The point is not to miss them.
Christopher - Sydney Morning Herald

There is poignancy and tenderness in the spaces between the humour. Like a good joke, Sweet Time is a story which lingers. Reilly's sense of time and eye for detail is acute. It is part of the pleasure of the book. He writes with an easy elegance.
Sydney Morning Herald

Sweet Time is a funny and often moving novel about the need to belong, as seen through two people's struggle to change their lives without sacrificing the sweetness of their times.
Michael Jacobson, Weekend Gold Coast Bulletin

In Sweet Time, Reilly has crafted a comedy of accommodation between football and language codes. The ribald fun of this good-natured book issues from Scottish mouths. Reilly ably shows what comic riches the migrant experience yields.
The Bulletin

Rare, laugh-out loud read ...a riotous novel...so pertinent and provocative
Julie Rieden - What's On Weekly

Full of life, humour, passion and violence- I loved it!
Wendy O'Hanlon - Sunshine Coast Sunday