Mark Brandi is an award-winning crime novelist whose fifth book. Southern Aurora – as one reviewer noted, “takes hold of your heart. Breaks it a little, as well as fills it with childlike hope and compassion.”
Hi there. I’m your host, Jenny Wheeler. And on Binge Reading today, author Mark Brandi talks about how his own experience as an Italian-born Australian has attracted him to write stories about young boys coming of age in hard times,
Like Jimmy his lead in Southern Aurora, a character who as one critic said was “impossible not to fall in love with. There’s a Mark Twain innocence and inner wisdom to Jimmy one far beyond most adults as he skirts his underprivileged life, seeking meaning and dreaming of a larger existence.”
That’s coming up with Mark in a moment or two
Links mentioned in this episodeWimmera, Mark’s award-winning debut novel:
The Rip: https://www.hachette.com.au/mark-brandi/the-rip-from-the-award-winning-author-of-wimmera
The Others: https://www.hachette.com.au/mark-brandi/the-others
Jane Harper’s The Dry: https://janeharper.com.au/
Willy Vlautin: https://www.willyvlautin.com/
Sofie Laguna: http://sofielaguna.com/
Tony Birch: https://www.harpercollins.com/blogs/authors/tony-birch-202213710733
The Overland train: https://www.journeybeyondrail.com.au/journeys/overland/
Mark’s Writing teacher: Ania Walwicz: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ania_Walwicz
The Southern Aurora: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_Aurora
‘Grief Invites This Kind Of Magical Thinking.”
The Anniversary, Stephanie Bishop: https://www.amazon.com/Anniversary-Stephanie-Bishop/dp/0802161677
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Ken Kesey:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Flew_Over_the_Cuckoo%27s_Nest_(novel)
Where to find Mark Brandi online
Website: www.markbrandi.com
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/markbrandiwriter/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mb_randi/
Twitter: @mb_randi/
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Introducing award winning author Mark Brandi Australian literary crime author Mark BrandiJenny Wheeler: But now here’s Mark. Hello there, Mark, and welcome to the show. It’s great to have you with us.
Mark Brandi: Hi, Jenny. It’s great to be with you. Thanks for inviting me on.
Jenny Wheeler: Southern Aurora is the book we’re talking about particularly today. It’s your fifth novel, but it’s set in similar locations to the first books that you’ve written.
They’re all small town, rural Australia, with characters who generally live on the wrong side of town. They’re seen as literary crime novels.
That’s how they’re defined. But the crime aspect in Southern Aurora is slightly downplayed. It’s more of a coming of age novel. Would you agree with that?
Mark Brandi: Yes, I think that’s a fair assessment. Jenny.
It’s funny with my novels. If I go back to the first one Wimmera, which came out in 2017. It is also set in a small town and has elements of crime in it. But when I wrote it, I never really thought about it as being a crime novel. In fact, I’d actually never read a crime novel before I wrote my first book.
It came as a bit of a shock to me when my publisher started marketing it as a crime and as literary crime and saying it was in a similar vein to Jane Harper’s The Dry. I went out and busily read a whole lot of crime books lest I come across as an imposter. But I suppose I’ve never really thought deeply about genre.
Character and voice come firstWhen I’m drafting, my starting point always is character and voice. In this case, with Southern Aurora, with this boy Jimmy, who’s around 11 or 12 years old, as you say growing up on the wrong side of the tracks in this small town.
His story actually started for me as a short story.
I wrote this short story back in, I think it was around 2014, and it was actually based on some experiences I had growing up in a small town.
We had a dog who came to an unfortunate end. I wrote a short story based on that experience and fictionalized it of course. And I suppose I kept going back to it and thinking there’s some more to this.
There’s something about this which is scratching at me and I need to go further into this story.
And that’s where it began, I think that, that age, that kind of 11 or 12 years old is a really crucial age. And for Jimmy, his friends are his whole world.
His siblings are his whole world and his family.
He’s the kind of kid that takes the world on his shoulders to a large extent.
I felt compelled to follow him and to write his story. I was thinking yesterday, I remember reading this quote from William Faulkner and he talked about the writing process somewhat facetiously.
He said that, “writing is easy. You just make up these characters and then you follow ’em around and write what they. do.”
Telling a story through a child’s eyes Mark Brandi’s award winning debut novel, Wimmera.It resonates with me a bit because that’s the way I feel about my process. I never think about the overarching story at the very beginning.
I never think about genre, but crime comes into my stories at some point.
I think you’re correct that this book perhaps has less of a crime element to it and fewer of those kind of tropes that you sometimes associate with crime novels
Jenny Wheeler: Yes. What is it that attracts you about telling the story through a child’s eyes, do you think?
Mark Brandi: I think my psychologist could probably answer that better than me sometimes. Now my first book, Wimmera was in the third person perspective, but the first half of the book was very much focused on these two kids, Ben and Fab.
The Rip was an adult story that was set in Melbourne, a contemporary story. But The Others was told through diary entries through this young boy, Jacob.
And now of course, Southern Aurora (Published June 28, 2023). And after I finished The Others, my third book I thought, oh, that, that was really hard going.
I found that a really tough book to write and I promised myself at that stage that I wasn’t going to do another first person perspective of a child because I find it really tough because you’ve got a limited palette.
To work with vocabulary and their wildness and all those sorts of things.
The cruelty of the school yard exposedBut you need to be able to still craft a compelling story for an adult readership. And I think that’s where the crux of it and some of the appeal of it is for me because it’s a challenge. It’s a constraint.
And one of the things I love about that kind of perspective is that the reader will often feel a degree of protectiveness over the protagonist.
They’ll be reading a little bit ahead and a little bit more deeply into what is happening and thinking. ‘Oh, no, Jimmy. Don’t think that, or don’t go there.
Don’t go with that person. Or, ‘this is a bad move’ and you take on almost like a caring relationship with the character.
And I love that as a reader. Like when I think about books so looks I love by Sofie Laguna or Tony Birch, or the American writer Willie Vlautin, who also writes young protagonists.
I just get engrossed in that world and I care so deeply about the characters, so that’s probably why I write these kinds of books, because that’s what I love to read ultimately.
Jenny Wheeler: The cruelty of the schoolyard is one aspect of this story. Jimmy falls out with the friends that he has, and he is left in this very isolated position.
He resorts to going to the library at lunchtime because he doesn’t have anyone to sit with. And that’s a scenario that I think many of us can identify with at some stage or other in our lives.
I know that part of your story was that you came to Australia from Italy when you were quite a young person, and I wondered if you had that sense of being a little bit of an outsider or at least a little bit different, and whether that’s helped you to be able to frame these sorts of stories.
Mark Brandi – Feeling for the outsiderMark Brandi: That was very much my experience. You hit the nail on the head. Growing up in a small town in Australia, in Western Victoria, we were the only Italian family in town.
I had three older brothers. They weren’t born in Italy. I was born in Italy and it it was tough in the school yard.
I was the brown kid in the school yard. And I found that really difficult in my primary school years.
Again I think that’s probably a something psychologist could answer for me because I guess I do feel a strong ability to be able to write that kind of perspective because I know what that feels like.
And now, I don’t want to say that Jimmy is me, or me as a child, or anything like that, because I feel most of my characters, they’ve got elements of me in them for sure.
But part of them is people I’ve met, but also just pure creation. Something out of my subconscious.
But that was certainly an experience that I drew on that sense of being an outsider.
There’s that cliche in country towns that you’re only a local once you’ve got, two or three generations in the cemetery. And I think that, that was our experience.
Now I loved growing up in a country town in many respects there were great elements to it. It was that bucolic cliche in some respects of being let out the front door in the morning.
Learning some hard life lessonsYour parents don’t care where you go as long as you’re back by night. We would go rabbiting, we’d go fishing, looking for yabbies and all that sort of stuff, playing sport with our friends.
So that was all great. But certainly, those early years of primary school were very tough and I think that undoubtedly leaves a mark on you.
I think that again is probably part of the reason why I write that child’s point of view and while I’m in interested in writing about that experience, because those early years of our life have a huge formative effect on the kind of people that we become.
And I can remember some of the things that happened when I was a kid, and certainly the intensity of the relationships that I had with my friends with greater clarity than what I could remember doing last week sometimes.
I think that that was something I wanted to bring to the book; is for Jimmy, his relationship with his best mate Danny is really crucial.
He’s his one friend at school, and then this other kid enters the frame. Chadwick, who’s a good kid, but it shifts the dynamic between these two friends.
And that was something I wanted to explore because kids can be great, kids can be wonderful, but they can be very cruel as well.
And Jimmy’s faced with that in the story. He has to learn some pretty difficult life lessons.
Southern Aurora a symbol of hopeJenny Wheeler: The Southern Aurora of the title is a train and it represents something of escape from that life, for Jimmy, doesn’t it?
Tell us about Southern Aurora.
Mark Brandi: The Southern Aurora was a train that used to run from Melbourne to Sydney and Sydney to Melbourne, and for Jimmy living in this fictional town of Mittigunda in New South Wales, he sees the train coming and going and passing through.
It has its kind of luxury, “quote unquote” carriages, sleeper carriages.
And it represents something I suppose a ray of hope for him that there’s something more to life and something more outside of the town that he’s growing up in and something more than the experiences that he’s facing.
And part of my inspiration for it again, came a little bit unplanned, I think from my subconscious when I was writing, that the train was very similar to a train that went through the town that I grew up in in Western Victoria in the 1980s, which was The Overland, that used to run from Adelaide to Melbourne and vice versa.
And I was transfixed by this train going through. this is all pre-internet. Days and you didn’t know much about the outside world or the big cities.
I didn’t really go to the big cities and neither does Jimmy in this story. So it represents something more something else out there, and it really offers him a ray of hope.
And he often goes down there to the cutting, goes with his younger brother, Sam, and watches the train and looks at the people in the carriage.
One day, Sam, we’ll be on that train…And, he tells Sam, one day that’ll be us on that train. That felt very important to me, because he’s facing some tough circumstances.
His mum is doing it tough. She has issues with alcohol. She has this new boyfriend who’s quite violent and erratic.
His older brother Mick has been in trouble with the police is in jail soon to get out.
Things aren’t easy for him in his world. It was very important to me to have that symbol of hope for him.
Jenny Wheeler: I found it touching. You mentioned his mom’s attachment to alcohol. She drinks a beer called – I think it is a beer, isn’t it? – The Kaiser? I don’t know.
Mark Brandi: It’s wine. A cask wine.
Jenny Wheeler: Oh, it’s oh, cask wine. Kaiser is like another character in the story to Jimmy, Kaiser is like a friend that comes to family parties and he recognizes sometimes isn’t a good friend, but the Kaiser has a real personality in the story as well.
Mark Brandi: Yes. And I should say that I grew up in a pub, so I was very familiar with alcohol and the many different brands of alcohol and what they might represent.
And it was funny. My parents ran this pub for about 30 years. And we would have people, in country towns you have people from all walks of life coming in there.
There are very democratic places. You have local police, politicians, shearers, farmers, business people. Alcoholics, chronic drinkers the unemployed, some people had just gotten out of jail.
All sorts of stories. And I suppose I witnessed those kind of really dependent relationships with alcohol when I was a kid.
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100%;}.formkit-form[data-uid="d471e51619"][min-width~="600"] [data-style="minimal"]{padding:40px;}.formkit-form[data-uid="d471e51619"][min-width~="600"] .formkit-fields[data-stacked="false"]{margin-left:-5px;margin-right:-5px;}.formkit-form[data-uid="d471e51619"][min-width~="600"] .formkit-fields[data-stacked="false"] .formkit-field,.formkit-form[data-uid="d471e51619"][min-width~="600"] .formkit-fields[data-stacked="false"] .formkit-submit{margin:0 5px 15px 5px;}.formkit-form[data-uid="d471e51619"][min-width~="600"] .formkit-fields[data-stacked="false"] .formkit-field{-webkit-flex:100 1 auto;-ms-flex:100 1 auto;flex:100 1 auto;}.formkit-form[data-uid="d471e51619"][min-width~="600"] .formkit-fields[data-stacked="false"] .formkit-submit{-webkit-flex:1 1 auto;-ms-flex:1 1 auto;flex:1 1 auto;} As a publican’s son, alcohol ‘normalized’
But it was quite normalized to me.
I never saw it as a stigma in that way. I thought, these are just people. That’s what. They come to the pub and drink during the day, and then they go home and that’s okay.
One of the things, my late father really impressed upon me was that everyone has a story.
And it’s really important that you stop and listen to them and talk to them. So that was a great lesson because, he would put me when I got old enough, I worked behind the bar.
I was a deeply introverted young person, so that was tough for me. But he was like, go talk to the regulars, have a chat to them, and some of them are just lonely and hear them out.
That was just wonderful advice and it taught me that some people just have had a bit of bad luck. And things haven’t worked out well for them and there can be a whole lot of complex reasons why people tend to alcohol.
Now for Jimmy, looking at his mum and the Kaiser, yeah, it does become a character of its own, and it’s this presence throughout the novel really to varying degrees and it’s symbolic, as well. of Jimmy’s attempts to try to help everyone in his circle.
But also sometimes try to control things a little bit too much for a young kid. He tries to look out for his mom, makes sure that she doesn’t drink too much. Things go well with her new boyfriend. He takes this all on his own shoulders and that’s a, a really tough thing for anyone, let alone a young boy.
A celebrated teacher’s wisdomJenny Wheeler: It’s a classic case of children becoming the parent and it’s recognized that’s not a healthy place for a kid to be.
He’s obviously a young boy deserving of more support than he gets, but the tone of the book is carefully neutral about assigning any kind of blame anywhere, and he’s dreaming of his life getting better, but he’s stoically accepted it as it is as well.
I wondered, tell me how you viewed Jimmy? Do you think he ended up having a good adult life?
Mark Brandi: I remember – it might have been one of my tutors when I was studying, like in a TAFE (Technical and Further Education facility) course, I was doing creative writing.
I started this course about 10 years ago. Did it for about 12 months, and it was after a long, a pretty long career working in government, working in the justice system for a large part of that I started this writing course.
I had this great teacher Ania Walwicz., her name was, she’s now passed away. She’s a poet and a performance artist.
And she talked about, and I loved this description, she talked about the best endings being like gateways through which you see the world a bit differently and you can imagine the characters going off beyond the page and what they’re doing now or where they might be or what they might be up to.
I think with Jimmy, it’s interesting what you said about the kind of neutrality that I tried to bring to this book because it’s very important to me not to be didactic, not to be trying to write stories with a “quote unquote “message.
A delicate balance on social issuesI want to tell a compelling story about people in a given situation that’s hopefully, believable and engrossing for a reader. What a reader takes away from that is entirely up to them. I’m always very careful not to direct readers in particular directions.
But I think part of the atmosphere that I’m writing these stories in is one of increasing Inequality and disadvantage here in Australia.
And the housing is a huge issue. The gaps between the very wealthy and the poor are widening and the ability of people to escape sometimes very difficult situations is getting harder and harder.
So even though this book is set in the mid 1980s, these issues are still there and if anything probably more acute now.
As for Jimmy, I hope he is doing okay. That’s all I can really say. In my work in the justice system you would see – I worked in the correct corrections area for a while.
I was a ministerial advisor and a lot of what we learned about the corrections system is that people just cycle through again and again. And often it’s from situations of a high disadvantage. I think we see that to some extent with Jimmy’s older brother with Mick because he has his repeated contact with the police. And then in ending up in prison.
I’ve higher hopes for Jimmy. That’s about all I’m willing to wager at this point. I’m not sure where he’d end up, but I hope he’s doing okay.
‘Never underestimate the intelligence of readers’ The Rip. Mark Brandi’s second novel took a homeless woman, Dani, as it central character…Jenny Wheeler: You mentioned The Rip, your second novel, and that was one where you had an adult protagonist, but she was a homeless woman.
And we have skirted around this. There’s definitely that underlying tone of social justice concerns, but you are very light-handed with them, aren’t you?
Mark Brandi: I try to be, because again, it comes back to what I like to read. Anytime I get the sense that an author is trying to sell me a message or teach me something, I recoil.
I think you have to treat readers with the utmost respect. One of the best pieces of advice I’ve ever got was don’t underestimate the intelligence of your reader.
You’ve got to really respect them. There’s definitely this social justice theme. It was partly why I ended up working in government and doing the jobs that I did.
Because I, as some people might derisively say, I was a believer and I wanted to improve things for people.
I cared about my work and I cared about trying, I suppose to make the community a fairer place for people with more opportunity.
I found that tough going sometimes in my professional life, but it was also very rewarding work.
Giving the overlooked a platformEven though it was difficult, I can still express some of that feeling in my work and I can follow those themes, but they’re not front of mind when I’m writing with each book.
Using the example of the rip, that was probably as much a response again to some of the atmosphere at the time.
I wrote it because here in Melbourne, we had and continue to have a big issue with homelessness and what happened around the time that I was drafting that, which was 2017 2018, is that it really hit the headlines because a lot of homeless people had set up camp in C B D because there were some services there.
And some of the media took a particular angle on that saying, that this was a an embarrassment to the city and these people should be moved out.
They had photos and they continued to do this. In fact, have photos of people shooting up on the street.
And I just thought, oh, this is really, it broke my heart a little bit because it just seemed to reflect I suppose a lack of compassion for people who are doing it tough, and I was interested in their stories.
Now, I had some contact with people over the years who’d found themselves in tough circumstances through my work and also just in my personal life.
And so I felt really compelled to write a story from the perspective of someone who’s living on the streets and in the area that I’m living in now which is lovely area.
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