Byron Boy by Luca Van Der Heide (Scatole Parlanti, 2020)
The young unnamed backpacker who narrates this novella is searching for an escape from routine and predictability. This quest takes him from Italy to New South Wales in Australia – all the way to Byron Bay to be precise.
The slim volume recounts three months of keeping body and soul together by doing back-breaking work as a blueberry picker. In the process he forges friendships that are destined to be fleeting since the chosen life of the traveller means that hellos are temporary and goodbyes are final. The typical questions this transient community ask one another are: What brings you here? Where have you been? Where are you heading?
What connects these fellow journey men and women is a kind of updated hippy lifestyle dream. Freedom is the constantly moving target. They may have different notions of what true liberty means but they share a common agreement that hell constitutes a comfortably numb life of ease. The author is driven by a fear of not finding independence; of feeling trapped in a vicious cycle of conventional life choices.
Yet the new connections he finds come with their own set of challenges. He is travelling with a spiritually inclined Japanese man of few words called Taro who is ever present without ever being a protagonist. It is as if his role is as an alter ego or even as an imaginary friend.
The narrator’s most significant encounter is with Luna, a fledgling love story that is destined to end in tears since both are committed to moving on rather than settling down. They are both there to find themselves, not to locate life partners.
To a younger reader, there will an obvious appeal for this unconventional ‘into the wild’ existence free of family ties although the hand to mouth existence is by no means glamorized.
Luca is the son of good friends of mine so the autobiographical details are easy to identify. Fictionalising his experiences gives him full scope to embelish the details but the story does not really have a plot and is written as a daily diary of an aspiring writer. For me. going the whole hog and writing a more fact-based travelogue would have been more interesting. I find the descriptions of the mental and physical demands the most revealing sections.
This book may unwittingly stand as an ‘alternative’ lifestyle choice that may no longer be possible in a post-Covid world. One certainly imagines the backpacking community will become more splintered in the future. The experiences of future Byron Boys are likely to be more complicated as travelling without bureaucratic restrictions is destined to be severely restricted for the foreseeable future. Reality is always hard to escape from and twice as difficult while the pandemic rages.
[At present, Byron Boy is only available in Italian. If you have a good intermediate knowledge of this language, this novel is an easy read and, at just 134 pages, not so long]
