Reviewed By Toni Whitmont, Booktopia Buzz Editor
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I had finally done it: I had become the boy who knew too much. I had rolled the dice and they had come up with snake-eyes, and now I was a wanted criminal.
I asked if I could go for a little walk, and I was told, to my amazement, not to go too far. Too far! I was planning on going to Costa Rica, or maybe Heligoland, because I had no idea where those places were, so I reckoned no one else would either....
I have always had a soft spot for fiction that can speak in an authentic child's voice, and Peter Twohig pulls this off brilliantly. Not only that, but he is very clever in the uses of maps as means by which his main character can navigate his physical and emotional universe. This was used to great affect in Reif Larsen's wonderful The Collected Works of T. S. Spivet only this time we are in the much more familiar territory of Melbourne in 1959.
Peter Twohig is a funny and interesting man, as you can see for yourself by reading his answers to our Ten Terrifying Questions.
I got a lot out The Cartographer. Twohig brings his original life view to his debut novel, which is bold, inventive and unexpectedly poignant.
The nameless child who tells the story handles the terrors of his life by adopting the strengths of fictional pop culture characters he admires, drawing on comics, radio and television dramas, and movies, finally recreating himself as a superhero who saves himself by mapping, and who attempts to redeem himself by giving up his persona so that another may live again. His only mentors are a professional standover man, his shady grandfather, and an incongruous neighbourhood couple who intervene in an oddly coincidental way. Better still, it is all still in the dark, dangerous lanes and underground drains of grimy 1959 Melbourne.
The Cartographer is a story bristling with outrageous wit and irony about an innocent who refuses to give in, a story peopled with a richness of shifty, dodgy and downright malicious bastards, mixed with a modicum of pseudo-aunts, astonishing super heroes, and a few coincidentally loving characters, some of whom are found in the most unlikely places.
