The strangest thing about Tauranga writer Anne Cleary’s debut bestselling thriller The Nowhere Boy is precisely the fact it’s her debut, because there is nothing uncertain or wobbly or over-cooked, none of the traits or flaws of the first-time novelist—it’s smoothly and confidently crafted, capturing your attention on page 1 and keeping you stuck to the story until it ends on page 317. Small wonder her manuscript won the 2025 Allen & Unwin fiction prize. I see the book has been edited by the fabulous Jane Parkin but I’m guessing she didn’t have to go scampering around the pages with her usual cargo of scissors and bandages. The plot of The Nowhere Boy is direct. Cleary follows the paths. It’s a very efficient book, and by some distance the year’s most exciting thriller.
A little boy goes missing. His birth name is Oliver, but everyone calls him Apple Man. He was with his father Scott at Muriwai Beach. Scott left him in the car with the windows down, and came back to find—nothing. But the author doesn’t waste her time or yours by contriving some kind of mystery about Apple Man’s disappearance. She tells you exactly what happened and who snatched him and why. What follows is a series of quite brilliant character sketches of Apple Man’s separated parents, Scott and Fae, and his abductor, lonely Tessa. The mystery is whether they will get him back from Tessa or sink beneath the weight of grief, alcohol, and their idea of themselves as bogan losers.
The book is set in the boganlands of West Auckland. Fae’s boyfriend Joe works at Rockshop Henderson and rents in Ranui. Fae was with Joe when Apple Man was taken; they were drinking bourbon and sucking on bongs. “Fae remembers it in pieces and parts. Dancing with Jazz in their bikinis in the living room, with Joe and Cody as the audience. They’d danced on the big flash coffee table, gyrating, pretending to make out, till it gave a loud crack and, shrieking with laughter, they’d leaped off. Fae also remembers puking round the side of the house by the recycling bins. And, of course, she remembers riding Joe in the big white bed, his hands all over her.” Her guilt is that she dumped Apple Man with Scott so she could run off to have sex with Joe; Scott’s guilt is that he left his son in the car for 45 minutes because he didn’t want to wake him up.
At first I thought the author went too far when she writes that Joe is in a band called Scumbucket. But I got talking to a data analyst on the Southern Line train the other day and he said he was in a death-metal band called Vomit, “pronounced, Urrrrgh!” Life is always stranger than Spinal Tap. Even so, I still think the author went too far when she named one of Scumbucket’s songs as ‘Rim of the Condom’.
Otherwise she gets the bogan vibes just right. Her characters are complicated people, neither good or entirely bad; not even the missing kid has a heart of gold. All of this is excellent, when Cleary writes of Fae and Scott hooking up: “They’d met on the porch of the rugby club. It was a friend’s twenty-first. A band was playing cover songs, badly … Fae had drunk too many Woodstocks and was having a hard time walking in her platforms. She’d gone outside for some fresh air and to escape the painful slaughter of ‘Heart-Shaped Box’, one of her favourites. Scott was out there, too, leaning on the porch railing. They’d got talking, laughing about how agonising the music was. One lurching moment spun into the next and they’d ended up round the side of the hall. Apple Man was conceived over the slick bonnet of someone’s Skyline. It was over in minutes, as though it had never happened.”
They tried living together but it didn’t work out. Something is wrong with Scott; he really does come across as a bogan loser. Something is wrong with Fae; she worries, and is right to worry, that she might be a psycho. Something is terribly, obviously wrong with Tessa, Apple Man’s abductor. “She pictures again the shabby car and offensive skeleton bumper sticker. The scattering of beer cans and empty chip packets inside. The torn upholstery. And, hello, the most obvious: a little boy, alone and distressed, while his grown-ups were off tending their cannabis patch, or whatever they were doing that far out in the woods.” Taking him, she reasons, is rescuing him. “Beyond the hills, on the coast, people will be looking for Apple Man. They’ll be out in droves, combing the forest and the beach, worried sick. The family, police, loads of people from the small beach community, all searching as though their lives depend on it. So much tumult, so much commotion, and yet here he is, their holy grail, on the porch in the sun, munching a tomato sandwich. Tessa smiles. With her, Apple Man is cared for. Loved. With her, he’s safe.” He isn’t safe.
The police are called. They are peripheral to the story. There’s a fantastic set-piece when Joe drives Fae to Woodhill Forest to help with the police search. “The car swerves, skids. With a jerk and a bang, it mounts the bank and ploughs into a thick mesh of foliage.” The accident doesn’t serve any plot device, it just happens, just one more piece of chaos in the chaotic lives of bogans running around trying to do their best. Cleary is alert to West Auckland architecture. Characters shop at the Warehouse, and park out front of hair salon Katie’s Kutz.
“Sparrows and fantails flit in the pittosporum hedge,” Cleary writes, of Tessa’s home. Fae doesn’t live very far away and shares the same kind of hedge but occupies an entirely different world. “The smell of sizzling steak and onions wafts through the pittosporum hedge.” You feel for Fae, and Scott, but you feel for Tessa, too, with her delusions and her loneliness and her cruel abduction. Will she get away with it? I love this interruption in her thoughts which Cleary marks with a dash. “Tessa’s gaze drifts down the driveway lined with olive trees. They’re lovely in the summer. Pale and silvery, shimmering in the breeze with their—A car. By the letterbox. Turning in.”
Cleary is good at combining one thing with another. Fae mixes bourbon and Zopiclone. Tessa’s sister is a receptionist at Gym and Tonic. Scott’s bedroom has a poster of Amy Winehouse “with bedroom hair and a cigarette”. Fae tells him they should spend the day in each other’s misery: “You be Doom and I’ll be Gloom.” The most profound combination is from the mouth of Apple Man, who screams, over and over: “Mummy and Dadda.” I know I should feel for him but actually I sympathised with mad Tessa having to take care of a kid who refuses to have a shower or a bath. There’s something wrong with Apple Man.
The police search draws closer. Tessa feels the heat. She comes up with an ingenious idea which I absolutely did not see coming and was shocked when I realised what it was. Tess draws up four options of what to do with Apple Man. “She taps the pen and mutters, ‘Number four. Number four.’ She writes: ‘Definitely painless.’” Good grief.
Tessa comes up with option 4 at a rural address. I was reminded of the pet cemetery where Evelyn Waugh set his delicious satire The Loved One. Waugh: “At the administrative building, Dennis carried the dog to the refrigerator. It was a capacious chamber, already occupied by two or three other small cadavers. Next to a Siamese cat stood a tin of fruit juice and a plate of sandwiches. Dennis took this supper into the reception room and, as he ate it, resumed his interrupted reading …” Cleary’s book, too, takes a close interest in small cadavers as Tessa speculates what to do with a problem called Apple Man.
There’s a nice love story that takes shape in the background of The Nowhere Boy. “They settle on a park bench in the far corner of a reserve, the box of cans between them, sunlight dappling through the leaves of a liquidambar tree.” How romantic. All they need is their son back, and maybe a regular job would help, and it’d be good if Fae’s awful mother and even more awful stepfather kept away, and Fae gave some thought to addressing her anger issues … Cleary makes you care. She allows a happy ending for one set of characters, and a sad ending for others. Neither feels false. A moment of Spinal Tappery aside, she doesn’t make a wrong or clumsy step in the whole book. Very good story, very successfully told.
The Nowhere Boy by Anne Cleary (Allen & Unwin, $37.99) is available in bookstores nationwide.
