I first became aware of Craig Sherborne when I read his beautifully honed but laconic poems in Best Australian Poems 2003. Here was a fine craftsman with a diamond eye, writing with great grace of the racing life, of family, of childhood. An entire world was evoked. The poem “Brett’s Mum”, about an adolescent’s angst-ridden gropings with a school-friend’s mother, a 40-year-old gone a little to seed, set against a backdrop of Melbourne Cup Day, was a bolt of poetic compression, a stunning tale of youth, age and loss.
It’s lovely to see the episode revisited – refracted from different angles, and this time in prose – in Sherborne’s delightful memoir of a trans-Tasman childhood in a pub-owning, racing-obsessed and somewhat insular single-child family, made up of our hypersensitive narrator and the seriously flawed parents he nicknames ‘Heels’ and ‘Winks’. The book is structured as a series of vignettes in which a single event illuminates the way a young Sherborne tries to get the measure of both the hothouse world of family and the only slightly more bewildering world “out there”, full of menace and fascination. There’s a sense in which each vignette operates as a kind of cinema jump cut; the book moves forward at a cracking pace.
But, just as in Sherborne’s poetry, something complex and multi-layered emerges from the lean concision of his prose. Hoi Polloi is a loving but unflinching portrayal of life in a provincial town and of the shared desire to move out, literally speaking, and up, figuratively speaking. Mostly it’s just plain funny, a real page-turner. Sherborne captures cohesively and vibrantly the ever-shifting world seen through an ever-growing child’s eyes.