“Virgil and Homer would recognise these hulking airborne men,” Helen Garner wrote of AFL players in her most recent book, The Season. As the celebrated author and footy tragic watched her grandson play in an under-16 league, she found in the sport “a kind of poetry, an ancient common language between strangers, a set of shared hopes and rules and images, of arcane rites played out at regular intervals before the citizenry”.
Garner has enthusiastically blurbed the scabrous debut novel of former AFL player Brandon Jack: Pissants, a book mostly dedicated to the arcane rites that play out off the oval – preferably as far from the citizenry as possible. Whereas Garner lovingly traces the epic dimensions of teenage footy in the suburbs, Jack depicts AFL culture as a crucible for addiction, misogyny and brutal conformity. As readers of Jack’s 2021 memoir, 28, will know, this novel draws from the well of personal experience: much like his characters, Jack spent his early adulthood adjacent to AFL stardom, playing 28 senior games for the Sydney Swans before being unceremoniously retired.
