Me And Mr Bookerby Cory Taylor, Text, $32.95.
Martha is a bored 16-year old desperate to escape the tedium of small-town Australian life.
Mr Booker is the perfect and oh-so-obvious solution. He turns up in a slick white suit trailing smart lines, cigarette smoke and low-rent glamour — married, of course — and the book is Martha’s diary of their inevitable affair.
Taylor gets her voice exactly right, a combination of innocence and fake world-weariness (“I started to feel old when I was about 10”) so that even though you know how it’s going to end — badly, d’oh — it reads fresh and funny and free of self-pity or any need to explain or teach anything.
Mr Booker is a fabulous creation, a charming and despairing drunk. Equally vivid are Martha’s warring parents, both too preoccupied with themselves to bother noticing what’s going on.
Not that Martha wants to be stopped, she’s the heroine of her own romance and only we, the readers, can see the gap between her self-conscious sophistication and her true ignorance. Where the heartbreak lies.
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