Here Come the Dogs

October 12, 2015
This gritty, energetic debut novel comes from Malaysian Australian hip-hop artist and poet Musa. Three childhood friends who live and carouse in Australia’s blue-collar suburbs spend a long, hot summer getting their adult acts together. Aleks Janeski, married with children, is a violent petty criminal/enforcer who works a legitimate day job as a house painter and longs for returning with his family to his Macedonia homeland. A high school basketball star before an injury cut his playing career short, Solomon Amosa is an underemployed Samoan dishwasher who loves to party while he keeps his interests alive in his favorite sport. Solomon’s erratic half-brother, Jimmy Amosa, works at a public service call-in center, dreams of purchasing a Dodge muscle car, and indulges his strong passion for hip-hop music. The friends like to hang out and do things like paint artful graffiti on public walls, but Aleks’s strong-arm crimes catch up to him. He serves two months of prison time, during which Solomon refuses to come and visit him. The friends are dramatically shown going in their separate directions, and, unfortunately, not all of their choices are productive ones. Musa narrates large portions of his story in accessible hip-hop lyrics, lending his novel its edgy, contemporary flavor. This is fully realized depiction of how art and life inform each other.

October 15, 2015
Three immigrants battle the heat, society, and their own predispositions toward conflict during one long, hot summer in rural Australia. Poet and rapper Musa is a certifiable rock star in his native Australia, and he definitely brings a frenetic intensity to his debut novel about coming of age in a land of strangers. The novel bounces its vibrating focus among three main characters, all of whom are distinctly drawn. For sheer swagger, there's Solomon, a rapper, poet, and basketball player of Samoan origin. We get inside his head through interstitial interludes where he waxes poetic on girls, his buddies, and street life. "Wish we had a white person with us," he muses. "Ten empty cabs have passed us by." Our tortured soul is Aleks, a house painter from Macedonia whose domestic life with his wife and kid is disrupted by his predilection for graffiti and crime that pays. The sensitive one is Solomon's half brother, Jimmy, another disenfranchised young man whose lack of connection to the world is starting to mess with his head. There's not a lot of momentum to the plot beyond Solomon and Jimmy's run-in with Damien Crawford, a government minister out to upend the country's Racial Discrimination Act. A lot of the book is just about getting through the day, whether it's drinking, messing around with the girls the book primarily views as ornaments, or suffering under the blazing Australian sun. But what the book may lack in narrative cohesion, it surely makes up in style, with its relentless pace and fierce ruminations on what it means to be a man. "You gotta keep calm," Solomon tells a kid he's teaching about the game. "Keep your composure. In this world, they're plenty of people trying to get you angry. Make you lose it. Never give in to 'em." A bravado novel about survival and rebirth in a subculture that moves to its own rhythms.

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