From Mumbai’s ‘illegal migrant workers’ to Melbourne crypto traders, The Degenerates is global Australian literature

Written by Michelle Cahill, Adjunct, Department of English, School of Humanities, University of Tasmania

In Raeden Richardson’s debut novel, The Degenerates, displacement and travel feature within the lives of aspiring outcasts in the wildly disparate cities of Bombay (Mumbai’s colonial precursor), in Melbourne’s inner-city lanes and southwest suburbs, and in downtown New York.

This is not strictly a novel about identity, nor assimilation. Not all its characters are Indians of the diaspora, but they all seek refuge from forms of oppression, be it caste-based, social or family violence.

Review: The Degenerates – Raeden Richardson (Text Publishing)

The Degenerates opens in 1976, with vivid snapshots of “illegal migrant workers” who leave their villages for Bombay’s Arabian sea slums, with dreams of saving enough money to buy a flat or start a family. The city is being gentrified, drugs get pedalled, arrests inevitably happen – but the lowly are not without humour, optimism and streetwise grace.

They attend “night school”, write in “cursive paragraphs”, learn “Keats and Byron” and “proper British English” from the nuns. Enterprising beggars are a familiar sight in Mumbai, and Richardson shows them to be a community tied to the legacies of colonialism.

Raeden Richardson’s debut novel features displacement and travel in the lives of aspiring outcasts. Text Publishing

‘Dear degenerates’

Richardson focuses on a shoe polisher from Western Maharashtra, Somnath Sunder Sonpate, who runs out of luck in Colaba’s Grant Road district, coming up against enforcers of Indira Gandhi’s mass sterilisation program: part of The Emergency from 1975 to 1977. This was a time of authoritarian rule, corruption, arrests, censorship and forced population control directed at the poor.

Somnath fails to narrowly escape the police and cannot produce a license, so he is sterilised. Meanwhile, Preeti, a woman he shares a tiffin (or meals) with, whose bed is made from the pages of old novels, gives birth in the street, without conception. This stroke of magic realism fuses the Christian belief in immaculate conception with the stigma of an oppressive Hindu caste system. Sadly, for Preeti, it is a double violence. At the hands of the beggar master, her tongue is cut out and she dies by incineration.

Somnath rescues her baby, and names her Maha. In a desperate struggle for survival, Somnath and baby Maha flee the city as stowaways, to arrive in the port of Melbourne.

The plight and flight of this street family rely on unlikely and extraordinary circumstances, establishing a mixed tone of surreal and tragicomic farce. They become squatters in Swan Street, Richmond, in Melbourne’s inner northeast. Then, in Degraves Street, Somnath labours as a shifty motorcycle mechanic in the chop shop and Maha eats herself into florid diabetes, becoming a consummate reader of history, scriptures and poetry.

When Somnath dies abruptly, Maha, also known as Mother Pulse, embraces her oddly divine manifestations. She receives letters on paper bags and napkins from outcasts, whom she addresses as “Dear degenerates”, imploring them to tell her their stories. She has them typed and printed into flyers, which are distributed under the windscreen wipers of cars. And so, the prayers and afflictions of the outcast – those who live precariously at the edges of society – are reclaimed and interwoven.

Critiquing privilege

There’s a hiatus in Maha’s story, as the narrative focus shifts to two selective school misfits, Titch and Skeater, or “ ” – a caesura – taking the place of his name. This grammatical marker becomes enigmatic of repression, private loss and what lies beyond the social fabric. The boys have a codependent, yet deeply poignant friendship at Melbourne High, until Skeater plunges into alcohol dependency.

Subsequent narrative sections cycle around Titch’s working friendship with Ginny, a Greek Australian bookseller and aspiring cryptocurrency trader. Both have troubled families: substance abuse, violence and mental health crises leave a path of brokenness. A survivor of abuse, Ginny escapes from her dysfunctional family in the suburbs with her sister, Marg, for a holiday in New York until her visa runs out. But Ginny’s caprices deviate from tourism brochures. She befriends stylish, free-spirited Klein, an orphan fostered by an orphan, who self-medicates in burlesque nightclubs with “liquid green manza”. Ginny briefly stays with his queer family; with Gordon, an intern at the The Paris Review; and Shelley, a tall, bald, non-binary Mauritian saxophonist. Their caring and valiant efforts to secure Ginny’s blockchain trade and a working visa in New York are doomed to failure. There’s more dialogue in this section of The Degenerates, albeit presented through a descriptive mode that frames the narrative action. The novel’s structure fuses realist and fabulist elements. By turns capacious and wry, it also reads as Maha’s coming of age as she transforms from Dalit orphan to suburban diva. When Titch discloses his crimes of theft, she believes he is a reincarnation of her foster father, Somnath. Her musings about rebirth and impermanence (“Here, gone”, “Many headed”) imply the plurality of a Hindu pantheon, but Maha is a standalone. Meanwhile, there’s something appealingly subversive and inherently Buddhist about the novel’s attention to small creatures like ants, a drug-intoxicated duckling, and even trilobites, extinct fossils who were “moved by the flux of life: hungering, feeding and hungering again”. Refreshingly, Richardson’s abrupt sequences creak with a subtle critique of heteronormative culture, and of elite privilege under socialist democracy or late capitalism. There’s more than a hint of reproach aimed at those who too often speak on behalf of the Global South. Maha’s low-caste mother, Preeti, is rendered speechless for claiming to possess special creative powers. But in its dance of minor perspectives, idiosyncrasies and conflations weaken the novel’s binding. The crystal meth Maha injects, leading to her gangrenous amputations, seems extraneous when diabetes is the cause. In an interview, Richardson has spoken of urban spaces and laneways in Melbourne, where he was born, as being like a palimpsest. Indeed, the novel is infused with literary allusions and tropes which should be acknowledged. Somnath’s forced sterilisation is strongly reminiscent of Ishvar’s in Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance, a novel also set in India’s 1975 Emergency period. Titch finds employment in Ginny’s bookshop after impressing her with the absurdity of citing the Russians: “The Tolstoy. The Dostoevsky. The Kafka.” Titch’s theft of drugs and cash faintly echo the transgressions of Raskolnikov, the impoverished student in Crime and Punishment. There is homage and a nod to foundational epistolary fictions such as Letter to Pessoa and To Silence. Materially gritty For all its flair and pastiche, The Degenerates retains a material grittiness. Like prose poured into blocks without line breaks, it reads like polished concrete. Each section or chunk is a cameo where the mundane become scenes of scrutiny, often with aesthetic appeal – whether it be Titch’s ants randomly in motion, the flow of water down drains, or the liquid in a case of contact lenses. Richardson has a penchant for acronyms, such as MDMA, EDM, ATM, CBD, KFC, PVC, BMX. He seems to insist on brands and consumables, like Doritos, Mars bars, Freddo Frogs, Krispy Kremes. Telstra shops, Rebel Sport, Target, SnapChat and even the “Commbank app” make appearances. Commodity fetishes animate the novel, however, its reliance on jargons of drug subculture and millennial crypto culture can be a strain to read, risking caricatures, at times bordering on cliché: Bitcoin. Ethereum. Ripple, too. Even Paxos. ‘Look at the gains, yeah,’ he said. The intense detail in Richardson’s descriptions slows down the action and depletes his characters of their psychological realities. Some of the most interesting “degenerates” – Somnath, Titch’s mother, and Skeater – make transitory appearances. This is, partly, because the author veers headlong into language’s potential for soundscapes, along with its capacity to explain and transcendentalise. Indeed, there’s an evangelical tone to the final section that deifies the writer’s task as being godlike. When Maha’s hundreds of followers leave their families and jobs to join her in the mythic “Red Plains”, setting up “tents, tarpaulins and laundry lines”, we are told: They watched her drive by the pages of Titch’s story. She was their creator. Their divine writer. They knew that Mother Pulse had dreamed them, her people, and set them in motion. It was true. The passive register of omniscient narration stems Mother Pulse’s fully embodied voice, even as she furiously writes about her followers, while they seem content to be written about “with compassion and care”. Richardson’s prose dazzles and sometimes overwhelms. However, the novel’s energy, precision, risk and charm generates scenes and outcast characters that are part of a community of marginal writing, to be read slowly against the canon, with all its literary categories, gates and privileges. There are complex reasons why minority narratives struggle to thrive within the flow and countercurrents of a globalising, neocolonial literary economy. The Degenerates is relevant for Australia in this era of hostile immigration policy, populist nationalism and protectionism. It poses not merely questions of travel, but provocations of travel writing, eschewing middle-class fears and insecurities. Its rare gifts are humour, perversity, syncretism and empathy for those marginalised, and their stories. Authors: Michelle Cahill, Adjunct, Department of English, School of Humanities, University of Tasmania

From Mumbai’s ‘illegal migrant workers’ to Melbourne crypto traders, The Degenerates is global Australian literature

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