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Craig Brown is a Kiwi-born author living in the United Kingdom. At the age of 16, he knew he wanted to write. At 18, after a ridiculously brief stint at university, he quit his Law and Commerce degrees to become a full time writer, which eventually he did, 31 years later. Call him a slow starter.
Reviewed by Asher Syed for Readers' Favorite
Craig Brown’s Dignity follows an unnamed boy in Petone, New Zealand, who first approaches Malcolm Beaumont, the council binman everyone calls Bogie, after classmates dare him to steal the man’s Coke. What begins as a childish test turns into an unlikely attachment, formed on a school bench and later along the Hutt River, where Bogie’s silence says as much as other people’s cruelty. The boy’s friendship with Katie Parata grows beside his loyalty to Bogie, while Willy Simmonds’s bullying keeps reminding him how easily a crowd can make cruelty ordinary. When Bogie’s private dream of owning a sailing boat reappears through an old yacht called Bit by Bit, the boy begins to understand that the town’s most dismissed man has a life no one bothered to see.
“With the sun beginning its descent over the horizon, he wrote out the card, addressed to a boy whose name he found he didn’t know...” It's true, the boy, who is the first-person narrator, is never named in Craig Brown’s Dignity. I actually found this to be the perfect capping on Brown's brilliant literary work, in which the author takes a methodical and calculated approach in allowing the story's biggest changes to arrive quietly. The writing is gorgeous, and the visual prose breathes life into Petone’s streets and around Wellington harbor, where repaired boats slip onto the water, and the children sit barefoot on the foredeck. The best part is Bogie. Brown fleshes him out as a man with few words but enormous inward life, something we see after a fire licks through and leaves only burnt timber. The narrator is excellent because he's imperfect, and his mistakes still feel authentic. The fist-pump moment is when we see how the word dignity is really used. Readers who connected with the tender human dignity of A Man Called Ove and the bruised coming-of-age memory of The Body are in for a treat with Dignity.
