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Book Review
| Michael Hyde, Hey Joe, Vulgar Press, Carlton North, 2003. pp. 224. $18.95 paper.
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| Hey Joe is a novel written for young adults. It tells of the search during the early 1990s by Jimi Thorn, supermarket worker and part-time university student, for his father Joe, a prominent anti-war activist and radical during the 1960s and 1970s. Post-war, Joe found it difficult to relate with the world and became a drifter. Raised by his mother Molly, Jimi only has childhood memories of Joe. |
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The novel opens with Jimi, aged 22, compelled by forces he does not understand, but essentially a sense of being incomplete, setting off in search of his father. He wants to fill in the huge gaps between his childhood memories and stories Molly has told him. It is a search that takes Jimi from suburban Melbourne to the cities and villages of Vietnam, a country still struggling to rebuild 20 years after the end of imperialist hostilities, kids still being injured and maimed by the detritus of war, huge tracts of countryside still devastated by American defoliants. |
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Self-discovery involving looking into one's own past is a common and popular theme in Youth oriented literature. Two factors distinguish Hey Joe from the pack and make it historically significant; the material the author works with, and the author himself. |
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During the mid-1960s through to the early 1970s, Australia was convulsed by a wave of youthful rebellion and militancy, at the heart of which lay Australia's involvement in the Vietnam war and conscription. For some it was a short step from opposing the war to commitment to socialist revolution and the overthrow of the capitalist system. So serious a threat to the established order was this dissent and opposition that in 1969 the conservative government of Prime Minister John Gorton considered introducing draconian legislation to curb freedom of speech and the right of assembly. |
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Author Michael Hyde teaches Professional Writing at Victoria University (Melbourne); Hey Joe is his third novel. During the 1960s and 1970s Hyde had a national profile as a student revolutionary; based at Monash University, feared in some quarters, he was a much arrested young activist, strategist, and intellectual. |
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Now in his fifties, Hyde has explained to interviewers why he wrote this novel, some 15 years in the making, involving research in Vietnam, interviews with Vietnam Vets, and drawing upon his own anti-war experiences. According to Hyde, there is a cultural and historical gap, a selective burying of the past when it comes to the Vietnam period; despite impressions to the contrary, there is an absence of accounts of the Vietnam experience from the point of view of those who opposed the war. |
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Hey Joe is an energetic, well crafted, gentle, yet firmly anti-war foray into this cultural gap. A narrative device Hyde uses warrants noting; Jimi is accompanied on his search by a folder of autobiographical notes for a book on the 1960s and 1970s his father had started working on but never finished. Twelve extracts from these notes appear in the novel, helping Jimi understand the tumultuous period, and the experiences, emotions, and politics of his father. The notes ring true, their immediacy, accuracy and energy strongly suggesting the presence of Hyde the autobiographer rather than Hyde the novelist. |
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In part Hyde dedicates his novel to his children, 'to make up for all those stories I should've told you a long time ago'. Hopefully Hyde will one day complete the unfinished book Joe Thorn began, but writing as himself, and Hey Joe will encourage other dissident activists from the 1960s and 1970s to tell the stories they should tell. |
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