Almanac Book Review: Braham Dabscheck reviews Brandon Jack’s novel ‘Pissants’

 

 

Pissants by Brandon Jack
Summit Books Australia, Sydney, 2025
328 pages, PB, RRP $34.99.

 

Reviewed by Braham Dabscheck

 

Between 2013 and 2017 Brandon Jack played 28 games with the Sydney Swans. In his last two seasons he only managed one game. He is the brother of Kieren Jack who also played for the Swans, and the son of Garry Jack who had a distinguished career as a rugby league player and coach. Pissants is an account of the doings of a group of players at a fictitious professional AFL club. It is not too much of a stretch to say the book, well most of it – and this qualification is important which will become clear later – is based on Jack’s time with the Swans. In an interview with Channel 7 on 2 August 2025, he said, ‘The book is almost about the different versions of me at different parts of my life communicating with each other’.

 

Pissants is organised into two conceptual sections of unequal length. The first and longest is of the collective, ‘The Pissants’ of the book, a term coined to describe a group of fringe players of this fictitious AFL football club. These players spend most of their time in the twos, sometimes playing with the senior team. They hang out together and get up to all manner of ‘mischief’ and things much worse. The second and shorter section, constituting less than one seventh of the book in five chapters that ‘appear out of nowhere’ across the book, is of a player who retired several years ago, who is on a sojourn through Europe and his interactions with those he meets on the way.

 

Pissants provides us with an excursion into debauchery. Amongst other things, it is full of expletives which, given I am a scholar with a genteel academic background, I feel unable to repeat. ‘The Pissants’ and others associated with the activities of this fictional club are obsessed with alcohol, doing lines and other drugs, and sex. Players are both sexual predators and prey, with such activity being performed in an alcoholic and drug-fueled haze with little memory of what happened, lack of knowledge concerning female genitalia, premature ejaculation and wanking. ‘The Pissants’ create different competitions around alcohol, dicks, video games, humiliating and sending each other up, stealing the dog of one player, tricking new draftees with fake journalists seeking information which can be used against them in another context, and a Kangaroo Court where sadistic punishments are meted out for some concocted misdemeanour.

 

Jack has a sharp eye for the absurd, is a wonderful wordsmith with an ability to paint a picture in a few words and propel a narrative to where he wants to take readers. Jack combines humour, despair and sadness in his accounts of the activities of ‘The Pissants’; the balance varying between the three depending on whatever antic, debauch or activity he is focusing on. He combines ‘straight’ narratives with streams of consciousness of drug crazed individuals, and what players, coaches and the media are really thinking when being interviewed or during games. This use of different styles, the voices of different ‘Pissants’, combined with the use of inserts and footnotes, techniques he also uses, is described as ‘kaleidoscopic’ writing.

 

Pissants is a very Australian novel. Not so much in that the focus of the book is on a fictional professional football club, but more so, that it is a take on Australia’s larrikin tradition and the myth of mateship. Pissants sees both in negative terms; it is ultimately a ‘study’ of nihilistic larrikinism and toxic mateship. Jack has his ‘Pissants’ lacking respect or regard for anyone they come into contact with and envy, if not hatred, of those who experience success. They are all (well, you know what). It is not so much that they are contemptuous of others; other players, coaches, club officials, the media, women, persons they come into contact with, but they also delight in humiliating and turning on each other if that will get a laugh from other ‘Pissants’; and have no hesitation in throwing another player under the bus in advancing their own cause.

 

In a section dealing with a Kangaroo Court where sadistic punishments are dispensed, the Judge of proceedings, wearing his wife’s best dress complains, ‘It was becoming increasingly hard to maintain a sense of community. The kids [players] displayed the worst kind of narcissism in the brief moments they looked up from their phones’ (p. 278). The only example of what might be called ‘heart’ in this section of the book occurs when one of ‘The Pissants’ tears up recalling a girl he had a crush on who died from cancer when they were both Year Twelve students.

 

Commentators on the blurb and inside cover have compared Pissants to other works which have conducted excursions into the dark world of debauchery. Prominent amongst these are Kenneth Cook’s novel Wake in Fright (1961), made into a film in 1971; Kathy Lette and Gabrielle Carey’s Puberty Blues (1979), made into a film in 1981, and a subsequent television series by Channel 10 in 2012; and Irvine Walsh’s Trainspotting (1993), made into a film in 1996. Another literary work which focuses on toxic aspects of ‘this game of our own’, that is at the corporate level, is David Williamson’s 1977 play, The Club, made into a film in 1980.

 

Jack canvasses a wide canvas of debauched acts associated with alcohol, drugs and sex. Little is left to the imagination. He is not scared to shock. To his credit, however, he has steered away from the racism sometimes associated with Australian mateship. This was a ‘bridge’ that he was not prepared to cross. He has one mention of a player who may have had ‘a bit of wog in him’ (p. 91). One of his ‘Pissants’ includes a gay joke and lambasts attempts to have a gay player come out of the closet. ‘Why subjugate yourself to all that extra attention. The whole world just wants to wheel you out like a meat puppet to get their own agenda across’ (p. 211).

 

While I was working my way through Pissants, marveling at Jack’s creativity and inventiveness as a writer and enjoying his wit (he has some wonderful jokes), I couldn’t stop myself from thinking that he is trying too hard, what’s the point of all this gross, sadistic nastiness and mayhem he feels compelled to write about? Why Pissants? This is where the shorter second part of Pissants comes into play. It needs to be emphasised that this second part is so out of character with the rest of the book.

 

Our retired player is travelling across Europe following a breakup with his girlfriend. Now remember this is a work of fiction; then again maybe it is not. While in England our retired player says,

 

I’m thinking about the day before we broke up and the car ride and how she said I can’t talk to her like that and how I pushed her away and how I always f…ing push people away because I’m a f…ing terrible person who hurts people and I deserve what I f…ing get (p. 224, the de-emphasis is mine).

 

A week earlier in Ireland he referred to ‘My own self-hatred trying to stop me from having any joy’ (p. 184).

 

In his Channel 7 interview Jack referred to how he was always anxious when he was with the Swans, worried if he was good enough – ‘of being on the fringe; of being in the team, out of the team, of resenting the team for not being in it’. Pissants might be Jack’s way of coming to terms with this anxiety, of getting this terrible period in his life out of his system; a kind of exorcism, enabling him to move on. Hopefully, he won’t need to dip back into this dark well for his next round of literary expression. We will have to wait and see. Pissants is a wonderful, creative work of fiction from an author with a unique voice. It appears Brandon Jack has found the place where he belongs.

 

(A slightly shorter version of this review was published by The NSW Australian Football Heritage Association on 9 August 2025. It is reproduced with permission.)

 

 

Too read more by Braham Dabscheck click here.

 

 

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