The Boy in the Green Suit: A Memoir

By Robert Hillman, Carlton North: Scribe Publications, 2003, 232 pages, paperback, $30.00. Reviewed by Lynne Barwick in the June 2005 issue.

Help more readers find out about this article
Slashdot   Digg   StumbleUpon   Del.icio.us

The role of narrative in the construction of self has been debated in the humanities for some time now. For Robert Hillman the centrality of narrative is clear. Throughout The Boy in The Green Suit, Hillman details how stories have defined and propelled his life. He suggests that narrative breeds more of the same: 'Any child can pick up a yarn that draws together fragments of daydream, threads of ambition, only to find much later that it has become the initial paragraph of a life story'. The starting point for Robert's story is a green island his father has described. It is a boy's paradise; home to a multitude of bare breasted and sexually pliant sirens. All it requires, thinks Robert, is a magnificent library. Though he suspects his father may have embellished the truth, Robert sets sail for the Seychelles in 1965. He is equipped with a couple of quid, a typewriter, a tight green suit and some books. His memoir focuses on the year that follows in which he undertakes a quest for both women and literature. It is probably not a surprise to learn that at sixteen he had more success with books than breasts.

Robert travels to Turkey, Iran, Kuwait and Pakistan, living by his inadequate wits and the constant, often exasperated, help of locals. When writing about his younger self, Hillman favours humorous and preposterous situations told with an emphasis on his naivety. He is soon stranded without money in a Greek hostel full of draft-dodging, free-loving Americans. Robert can only read his books through their orgies, lamenting his lack of worldly experience. It is a commonplace of literary memoirs that the writer's developing mind is signified by the reading of canonical books. It's less usual that fevered consumption of books is both a literal and metaphorical replacement for group sex. The young Hillman has aspirations to write like Chekov but reading is the one thing he seems good at. The older Hillman cuts into his own story with observations like: 'I don't know quite what it is we might learn from reading, other than the template of narrative. My reading didn't enhance my ability to cope with life'.

Hillman's chapters neatly divide his experience by settings such as 'Butcher Shop', 'Desert' and 'Prison'. Interspersed between this chronology are untitled chapters printed in a different font. These are brief scenes, like family snapshots, of significant events: Robert's mother leaves; a new mum, Gwen, arrives; a fishing trip ends on a sour note; Mum reappears after twenty five years. It is the story of the father's disappointments and the shadows cast on the son. Tragedy and farce are equally weighted throughout the book. Hillman writes about his own inadequacies with wry generosity but his family's pain is often unbearable: 'When I look back on the last days of my parents' marriage, I think of the little colony of ruin that lies in all adult hearts'. Failed stabs at happiness were made by all the Hillmans. Restlessness is a family trait, handed down, Hillman suggests, along with genetic material and narrative imperatives.

Young Robert is a self-conscious traveller, urged on by a head full of fantasies, until they start to break down: 'Narrating my story as I went along, fashioning its scenes, I was all at once hobbled by an inability to suspend disbelief'. His vision of a paradise awaiting his arrival, starts to evaporate. He reluctantly sells his typewriter. And as he suffers from dysentery at the end of his travels, Robert loses control of his story to an unknown author: 'I felt like a character in a novel -- made to act the fool, to humiliate himself, to hope when hope was ridiculous, to dance like a trained bear'.

By the end of his trip Hillman has gained experience in the form of disillusionment. He is still in the trousers of his green suit, now tattered and way too short. He writes, 'I booked a ticket on a ship to install myself in a story that my father had begun in his imagination, and that I had rounded out'. The book concludes with Hillman in his Father's graveyard: 'I enjoy the brief suspension of anxiety and fret that settles on me when I walk amongst the graves and see so many inalterable conclusions to so many stories. Here, editing is done with. The ending is perfect'. Hillman's theme -- the over-arching and seductive power of narrative -- is convincing.

The Boy in The Green Suit recently won the National Biography Award.

Citation

• Lynne Barwick. 'Review: The Boy in the Green Suit: A Memoir by Robert Hillman' [online]. Network Review of Books (Perth, Australian Public Intellectual Network), June 2005. Availability: <please cite the web address here> ISSN 1833-0932. [accessed 24 May 2013].

Back Cover Blurb

• Winner of the 2005 National Biography Award.
  
  'Robert Hillman's The Boy in the Green Suit is a perfect miniature. It is a memoir of great sophistication and artfulness, that is also dramatically moving and laugh-aloud funny... it is done with unerring tonal control, and a mastery of diverse literary skills - cameo characterisation, hallmark dialogue and a keen sense of literary architecture.' — Judges' citation, National Biography Award .
  
  'One of the many attractions of this book is the wry affection with which the older man is able to look back upon his younger self. This is a tribute to both the writer and, in a sense, to Hillman as a human being … The Boy in the Green Suit is an exquisitely painful book about one of the besetting conditions of modern life: restlessness … There's an old adage that you can change the scenery but not yourself. Hillman tells that story with poignancy and warmth.'—Michael McGirr, Australian Book Review
  
  'Hillman's observations of early 1950s family life and the 'colony of ruin that lies in all adult hearts' are particularly poignant. He writes with an understatement that is deceptive in its simplicity. File this one alongside George Johnston's My Brother Jack.'—Peter Muntz, Australian Bookseller & Publisher
  
  'Hillman's resilience alone makes this a memoir worth reading. A childhood where he was thought to be simple, a mother's desertion and much more, and yet the person shining through these pages has a great charm and optimism.'—Anne Susskind, The Bulletin
  
  'The great challenge of all memoirs is to walk the tightrope between personal reminiscence and stories which resonate far beyond the author and his or her family and friends. Robert Hillman achieves this balancing act nearly perfectly by mixing his stories of growing up in Victoria, and his subsequent travels around the world, with a wonderfully persuasive sense of innocent and endearing daydreaming.'—Bruce Elder, The Sydney Morning Herald
  
  'The book becomes the story of physical and psychic survival, with a sub-plot around the story of Hillman's father, recreated as a strong and deeply troubled presence. While it has familiar familial themes, Hillman's complete lack of sentimentality gives it a punch sometimes lacking in such memoirs. Further, when the wild ride across the Middle East and parts of south Asia ends, when the boy is home and the book is closed, readers may find themselves only just beginning to marvel at the ordeal it describes.'—Jill Rowbotham, The Australian
  
  Here is an unusual and beautifully written Australian memoir -- destined to become a classic -- that captures the vulnerability and ardour of youth, and the fragility and strength of parental love.
  
  It is 1965. Robert Hillman, a mere 16 years old, is planning an extraordinary adventure. Deserted by his mother, disliked by his stepmother, and puzzled by his father, Bobby needs comforting. His life in rural Victoria has offered no solace; his job at Melbourne's Myer Emporium, selling ladies' slippers, offers no prospects. So he does what any confused and lonely teenager would do: he escapes.
  
  Boarding a ship bound for Ceylon, he begins his search for paradise, inspired by his father's stories of a fabled island in the Indian Ocean. Bobby sets sail in a green suit, carrying a suitcase full of books and a typewriter. He has no money, no return ticket and, seemingly, no worries. He imagines the island he is heading for to be inhabited by beautiful, full-breasted women who will caress him while he writes prize-winning stories in the style of Chekhov.
  
  What follows is an account -- by turns heart-breakingly tender and side-splittingly funny -- of an innocent abroad. Put ashore not in Ceylon but in Athens, Bobby barters his way to Istanbul, Tehran, and Kuwait, lurching from slums and brothels to an implausible job at a ritzy hotel in Shiraz. Finally, a long haul through the desert ends in a jail term on the Pakistan border where, ironically, he finds the affection and acceptance that have always been the true objects of his quest.
  
  All the while, Hillman's odyssey has been part of a larger family drama. Woven through his story is his father's tale of struggle and sorrow. As the mature writer now realises, 'I booked a ticket on a ship to install myself in a story my father had begun in his imagination.'
  
  The Boy in the Green Suit is an unforgettable, bitter-sweet tale of the artist as a bewildered young man.

Have You Also Read?

• Falun Gong: The End of Days
  
  Maria Hsia Chang, Carlton North: Scribe Publications, 2004, 188 Pages, Paperback, $25.00
  Reviewed by Anna Hayes in the February 2006 issue.
  
  At the recent China Studies Association of Australia Conference in Bendigo, Yu Haiqing explored media representations of the 'threat of Falun Gong' to both Chinese nationals and the state. She concluded that the persecution of Falun Gong is directly attributed to the perceived threat posed by the sect to the Chinese Communist Party. In Falun Gong: The End of Days Chang, a political scientist, begins by outlining the historical tradition whereby secret societies have been able to stage uprisings and overthrow the body politic. In fact, Chang's accounts of the impact the various millenarian movements have had on China's political landscape are the true strength of the work as they clearly ... read more.