Throughout Abel Marvin’s tumultuous life, there has been one constant beam of hope: the plate of chocolates, biscuits and cakes his grandmother would always have on hand. ‘A plate of sweeties to balance out life’s nasties’ she called it, and in his foggy comatose state, it’s one of the few clear things Abel can focus on.

Abel is dying, and the disembodied voice of a nurse is asking him to give a full account of himself. In dreamlike stream-of-consciousness prose, Abel tells the story of his life. The pinball machines from his best friend’s basement form a recurring metaphor about the human condition throughout the story. One sudden bounce or tilt can send life careening off in unexpected directions. It’s a constant battle; the flippers need to be constantly flicked, because if the ball falls to the bottom, it’s game over.

Abel ponders the strangely cyclical nature of life: bushfires, love affairs, broken families, and superheroes all recur throughout his story. The non-linear narrative style helps to reinforce how surreal the process of living can be.

The stream-of-consciousness style won’t suit every reader – there are relatively few line breaks and there is no standard punctuation to indicate speech; sentences run into each other or curl away at strange angles into new anecdotes or afterthoughts. This leads to hypnotic walls of text that seem daunting, but are ultimately poetic once you grab onto them.

Abel’s story fits into the genre of a man recounting the follies and angst of his youth, accompanied by side tales about sultry older women and quirky girls who all wanted to sleep with him. But the strangeness of the experimental storytelling and the unconventional style mixes it up enough that it remains interesting and somehow fresh.

Reviewed by Alex Henderson