The Fur

Nathan Hobby

Fremantle Arts Centre Press

July 2004 $17.95

283p pb

ISBN: 1-92073-101-6

Spanning across two hundred and eighty three pages, The Fur truly is a Catcher in the Rye for the third millennium. At a first glance it is just another book, but after careful observation, is much, much more.

The Fur was written by Nathan Hobby and published by Fremantle Arts Centre Press in 2004, and was the winner of the 2003 T A G Hungerford Award. It revolves around the unlikely and reluctant hero, Michael Sullivan, a misfit who lives in a quarantined Western Australia, blocked off from the rest of the world because of an outbreak of fungi. Michael, the son of a conservative preacher wishes to be great, wishes to leave his small town, to run away from his dying mother’s last words, from his fundamentalist father, from the inaccessible and beautiful girls around him.

This is a book that bears resemblance to a rabbit hole, the further you fall down, the harder it is to get out, in the fact that the more of The Fur you read, you more you want to read and fortunately, the closing climax doesn’t disappoint. Appealing to quite an older audience, it does so without difficulty and delivers more than one hidden message, usually with explicit detail and philosophical phrasing, which may be a little difficult to grasp for younger readers. The Fur is more of a 14+ book. It has tasteful wordplay and enough text crammed into it; it serves as a great long-term casual read. It’s described as a darkly passionate book, and expresses frank political and personal dramas and opinions and takes the reader on Michael’s plight. The quality of the storyline is all but perfect, blending into an articulate personal struggle. Sheer ingenuity is the backbone of The Fur, its readability anything but disappointing.