Dominic Hoey’s third novel, 1985, captures a pivotal time in the life of Obi, an 11-year-old white kid growing up in a mostly brown neighbourhood. The title is possibly a nod to George Orwell’s dystopian vision, but at 58 Crummer Road, Grey Lynn, the opposite of Big Brother is true – no-one is watching the kids. Obi’s closest thing to a sitter is the local Spacies parlour, where his name glows proud at the top of the leader board.
When he finds a map in the bag of a recently released ex-con that includes an X marking the spot, he believes it could lead to hidden treasure: in the hope of discovering it, he and best friend Al explore far flung places such as Epsom and Titirangi. However, ending up stranded is a more likely outcome because this is Auckland and the buses aren’t running – one of the few things that hasn’t changed since 1985.
One major difference between then and now is that – despite having little money and a mum who is debilitated with a chronic illness – Obi’s family own their home. The house deposit was earned from drug money; it is freezing during winter, has a backyard that turns into a sewage pond during a storm, and is in danger of foreclosure when they fail to meet mortgage payments, but it’s still a house (why do I hear the Four Yorkshiremen sketch in my head as I type this?). Given the family’s income – Dad’s occasional shifts at the Kiwi Bacon Factory along with the odd paid poetry gig and petty theft, and sister Summer’s after school job at the Open Late Café – the 2025 equivalent of this home would be a storage unit.
Hoey perfectly captures the sheer tedium of the circular exchanges between Obi’s parents over money, resulting in nothing, and the restraint that Mum deploys to keep Dad’s ego intact and ensure household peace:
Most of the time Dad existed in an oblivious kind of optimism. Maybe that was why he didn’t seem worried about the letter from the bank. But Mum was too smart to succumb to the stale warmth of wishful thinking.
….‘It’s a lot of money,’ she’d said when they were unpacking the shopping that afternoon.
…..‘We’ll think of something,’ Dad said, placing some cans of tomatoes in the cupboards.
…..‘We don’t need to think of something, you just need to get some work, hon.’ Dad went quiet for a bit.
…..‘We might lose the house and with my health we…’ Mum stopped talking and glanced at me. ‘We need to keep hold of this place.’
Obi observes that, ‘on his face he was thinking of every possible way to get money that didn’t involve working’, that ‘Dad didn’t want to go back to the factory, or do anything really, other than write and drink and hang out with Mum.’
We get it – Obi’s Dad is a dick. He chases easy wins and grand dreams: stealing roast chicken one day, hoping for a big advance on a hypothetical poetry collection the next. Despite all of this, Hoey writes the character with a lot of love – as he does with all the characters, bar a few local thugs, a terrifying would-be kidnapper, and the rich family in the neighbourhood.
Maintaining young Obi’s perspective throughout, which Hoey does skilfully, means that the machinations of the adult world are kept to the edges of the narrative. His parents’ previous challenges with addiction are glimpsed rather than examined. Broader events such as the Rainbow Warrior bombing, the Springbok Tour, and the creeping displacement of Pacific families from Grey Lynn, flash by from the periphery.
Many of these families migrated to Aotearoa in the 1950s and ’60s to fill labour shortages. It’s likely that a generation of Al’s family did the same, taking on the kinds of jobs that men like Obi’s father deemed beneath them. Many of them settled in central Auckland suburbs like Grey Lynn, only to be targeted in the 1970s Dawn Raids, that punitive policy which conveniently aligned with an economic downturn and a tightening labour market. For Obi, growing up in a still-mostly brown neighbourhood before gentrification took hold, whiteness registers as a point of difference – even in himself: ‘I was in the cultural group at school. In the photos I’m the fat white kid looking confused.’
But there’s only so much context you can glean from a friendship between two 11-year-old boys. What Obi does know is that Al’s aunty is raising him and his siblings, their mother is absent – possibly due to mental illness – and their father was deported during the Dawn Raids and never came back.
When you’re always hungry, food occupies the part of your brain usually reserved for other pursuits. Obi unconsciously models his dad’s behaviour, chasing his own grand schemes in the hope of making enough to ease the family’s financial struggles. His focus on finding potential treasure derails other plans, including a promising video game competition, and shakes up his rock-solid friendship with Al. An aspiring filmmaker, Al has been talking for ages about wanting to see a one-screening only session of Paris, Texas. It’s excruciating to witness Obi steamrolling Al’s wishes in favour of his own, but also too believable considering the lessons he’s learned from his father – for example, Dad not turning up to a dance performance that Obi desperately wants him to attend. Instead, his mum, frail and struggling throughout, makes it there, even if her ‘sickness gave her an unreal quality, like she was one of the cardboard cutouts up at the video store’.
[M]aybe it was all the practice I’d put into the cultural group, or the fact it was past my bedtime but I felt so exhausted with Dad and all his shit.
…..‘I hate him.’ My voice sounding like someone else.
…..‘Come on now,’ Sam put his hand on my back. I shrugged it off but he put it right back there.
…..‘He loves you. But we all got our bad talents eh.’
…..Old Sam, he could be wise on occasion, the way a beating could sometimes mean justice.
Hoey does make it clear why Obi’s parents have stuck together, their relationship with each other multi-faceted and demonstrating true connection. They’re both idealists and, at a few points in their shared history, optimists. They protest against the Springbok Tour, share a love for literature, and Dad’s grand gestures include stealing a carload of flowers from the Parnell Rose Gardens and spray painting a poem on the road for Mum: his feelings for her remain boyish and romantic. A scene that shows us a glimmer of the person she once was before falling ill takes place at the Hard to Find Bookstore. ‘I guess for a few years it really felt like all this would fall away and something new, something better would take its place,’ she tells Obi. By ‘all this’ she means the ‘city, the cops, the rednecks, the racists and women haters, the schools and awful jobs, all the things that make life feel weary.’ But it didn’t fall away, as Obi suggests and she confirms.
Despite depicting the grind of scraping together enough coins to get through each day, 1985 is inherently hopeful, its characters vividly crafted with joy and a lot of crackling dialogue. And even if the kids are wandering far from home, getting kicked in the shins by local thugs, wagging more school days than attending them, and constantly hungry, there’s a community on the doorstep who make sure that the Obis of this world always feel loved.
