This sporting life

Patrick Ness revels in a world of male-bonding yuppies, cocaine and endurance swimming


by Malcolm Knox

393pp, Old Street, £10.99

Jamaica comes garlanded with extravagant-seeming praise from Malcolm Knox's native Australia, one critic even comparing it to George Eliot. This kind of hyperbole can be off-putting (and as your faithful reviewer, I'd never use hyperbole in a million, billion years), but don't let the author suffer for it. Though I somehow doubt Eliot would be writing about despicable Australian yuppies if she were alive today, Jamaica is still a remarkable book: witty, psychologically acute and muscularly well written, a summer read that could very well blindside you.

Jeremy "Hut" Hutchinson, "a twenty dollar haircut on a ten dollar head", is the eager linchpin of a group of wealthy Sydneysiders. He was born into money but is desperate for the acceptance of men even richer than himself, personified here by Blackman and Pongrass, both former Olympians, and both sleek, confident bastards who represent for Hut a club he'll never be able to join: "This was how the top half per cent regarded the top quarter per cent: a different world."

Plying them with booze and cocaine, Hut succeeds in folding Pongrass and Blackman into the periphery of his own group, led by lifelong friend Nayce, a miserabilist exasperated at Hut's unfailing optimism in the ever-present face of disaster. "[Hut] annoyed the shit out of you, but - it was like your children - when you were with him you stopped thinking about death." Bonding over a shared love of swimming, the group - joined by friends Book and Janey - decide to enter the Negociante Classic, a team endurance swimming race in the seas off Jamaica.

Off they fly around the world, Hut, Pongrass and Blackman in first class, the others in coach, and the divisions already begin to show. The team is only supposed to have five members; Hut invited himself along by paying everyone's way, despite the fact that his swimming is barely competent. He's also desperate to keep anyone from finding out a secret in his business dealings that could send him to jail.

Nayce has secrets, too, but his shared history with Hut is actually a bar to them being able to help one another. Hostility is almost the only thing they have left. The Jamaica trip, seen mostly through Nayce's harsh, judgmental eyes - he can't see the beauty of the country, only "the Marley and the ganja" - quickly descends into drug-filled mistakes, life-threatening encounters and personal Waterloos. And that's even before the race itself.

The plot may sound a bit lad-lit, but in the skilled hands of Knox, the writing is shrewd and whip-smart. A former sportswriter, Knox is excellent on the physicality of the race, but even more impressive in the quieter moments. Exhausted laughter is "as brief as a snapped twig". The group decision to enter the race is "like a major crime: it evolved as one small step leading to another, without any real decision, before anyone could say no". Nayce's relentless negativity can only see Jamaica as "a beautiful woman who hates herself", but of course it's Nayce doing the hating, so corroded by it that even the easiest pleasures pass him by.

Alongside Tim Winton's Breath, this is the second excellent novel in as many months to examine masculinity and male friendship in Australian sport, a subject that might seem of limited intrinsic interest. But it's not the song, it's how it's sung, and if Winton is an aria, Knox is early Rolling Stones. If you're looking for something meatier for the beach, something accessible to read but also engaging for your brain and heart, then pack both in your luggage and enjoy the trip.

· Patrick Ness's The Knife of Never Letting Go is published by Walker Books.