The Student

BACKGROUND The Student is a crime novel set in Gatton (Queensland) during the mid-1990s. Like my previous work, this novel brings together themes from cultural and literary studies. My primary aim with The Student is to explore the relatively unpaved field of Australian noir. As such this book is a much more formally noir story - in terms of scope, structure and trope - than my debut Four Days. From a craft standpoint, the book is a marked progression and further demonstrates my commitment to the prose-minimalism of hardboiled crime writers such as James Ellroy, David Peace and Ken Bruen. CONTRIBUTION The underlying theme of the novel is drawn from my ongoing research interest into the cultural Marxism of Louis Althusser. In Essays On Ideology, Althusser (1984) famously described ideology as 'the reproduction of the means of reproduction'. Althusser positions the education system as a primary apparatus of domination - what he calls an ISO, an Ideological State Apparatus. An ISO essentially teaches a type of working class submission. The Student aims to marry this bleak view of the education system to the downtrodden tone of noir. In The Student, it is not the hostilities of small-town Australia that traps the protagonist (unlike say, Jane Harper's The Dry or Kenneth Cook's Wake In Fright) but the concrete restrictions of class. SIGNIFICANCE The Student saw publication via Echo / Bonnier Publishing Australia. The paperback was released with cover blurbs from Edgar Award-winning novelist Adrian McKinty and the Perth literary academic David Whish-Wilson. Echo is a commercial trade publisher and the book was widely promoted and stocked. The Courier Mail gave over a whole page of coverage to the book and favourable reviews ran The Sydney Morning Herald, The Herald Sun, The Saturday Paper and various local papers. Media interviews for the book include PBS, RRR, 3CR and ABC Local. Kill Your Darlings literary journal and The AU Review published excerpts.