Sweeney and the Bicycles is, like the bike wheels on the cover, a kaleidoscope - of colour, character and language, of past and present, and of suburb-specific Melbourne detail. Central to this are exquisite depictions of joy - wild, unregulated moments of escape.
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Sweeney has been released from prison with a traumatic brain injury, and now undergoes therapy with psychiatrist Asha on the government dollar while living part-time at his house in Parkville, inherited from his grandmother, and part-time at a rooming house with society's cast-offs. There's old Sheriff with too many prison smarts, and young Jim with few smarts at all.
Sweeney, handsome, well-educated and smooth despite his traumatic flare-ups, doesn't quite seem to fit, and the resolution of this uncertainty is one of the novel's surprising arcs.
The book opens with Asha watching from an upstairs window as Sweeney steals Rose's bike from the street below. Watching and surveillance recur throughout the novel: Asha and her husband Bruce regularly debate the ethics of using facial-recognition software to mathematically interpret and store images of every human face. Sweeney paints his face when he steals bicycles, daring technology to unscramble the patterns and messages that obscure a simplistic reading.
Sweeney spends hours in therapy, working through past traumas that create despair and anger in his present. But on a stolen bike, "these streets intoxicate him. He feels he is flying. He rides now like a film director through brilliant scenes of colour and shape, to feel the atmosphere, the intimate mood of his sensations, the visceral tone of his own body moving within the larger frame of surfaces." In moments like these, characters dealing with pain escape into something almost beyond words.
The book uses language like colour, building layered characters who are finely and colourfully drawn. Sentences offer contradictions and clarity in a single paragraph. Characters take joy in tiny acts of sabotage, while the book unfolds big themes of state control and disrespect for people on society's margins.
With Sweeney and Rose beginning to cross paths, the stolen bike lingers as a narrative hook while the reader wonders, who are we supposed to be watching here? Will Bruce and his facial recognition software intersect with Sweeney and his disruptive facepaint? Will Rose see something with that telescopic vision of hers?
Nothing happens quickly, but it happens richly. This is a book to be patient with at first, then to devour - and ultimately to re-read, to see what the kaleidoscope might reveal a second time around.
