Alan Fyfe’s second novel is a zany, punchy, circuitous literary picaresque set in the regional city of Mandurah on the southwest coast of WA.

The story of The Cross Thieves works like a strange Rube Goldberg machine. One small act of kindness is followed by a tragic jump cut setting off a chain reaction that leads to as many as three violent deaths. Lilly gives Gark and Pell a good meal. She does this out of charity, ostensibly because they have nothing eat. Lilly is murdered some months afterwards in an unrelated act of femicide. All this occurs before the novel begins. Subsequently, The Cross Thieves can be read as an antic – comic, even – contemporary tale of vigilante revenge one random weekday night, however that would be to miss the point. What Fyfe wants to do is more complex and intricately designed.

There are two principal narrative arcs: Gark and Pell Hagar’s; and Joshua Chord’s. Gark and Pell are the titular thieves. They are brothers, young men rock-solidly loyal to each other, who happen to be homeless, on welfare and their arses most of the time. They are being chased throughout this fateful Wednesday evening by the homicidal Stanley boys, a notoriously brutal crime family (‘beast-men’). The cross is a memorial to Cyrus Stanley, and his brothers, Jeff and Turkey, will kill to get it back. Also it’s important to know that our heroes are starving: Gark and Pell have had nothing to eat for two days, since Lilly’s wake.

Joshua Chord is a Lutheran pastor in the Noble Shepherd Ministry. He appears well-intentioned – his vocation is unquestionably fervid – but it will turn out he is in fact predatory and lunatic. There are no dates provided in either arc but enough signposts to indicate we are sometime in the 2010s maybe, ‘that point in history, near enough to this point in history, when many people trusted all their cash to chips in a plastic passcard’. Which is a problem if, like Gark and Pell, you try to busk for a bit of coin at the shopping village.

These dual storylines are slowly, skilfully, braided by Fyfe. The first banding is around halfway through, contained in letters written circa 1997 between estranged sisters Mollie and Ellie Hagar:

FUCK THE BOOK OF DANIEL!!! Do you think I don’t know it by heart? Weren’t you there reading it with me while that foul pig played Christian rock in the background? FUCK THE BIBLE AND FUCK YOU!!! I’m not in a cult. WE were in a cult! YOU are still in a cult!!!!!!!!

‘That foul pig’ is Joshua. And Ellie and Mollie are Gark and Pell’s mother and aunt respectively. The sisters’ letters are both disturbing and fun to read, at once histrionic and hilarious. Sadly, both are victim-survivors of separate forms of sexual abuse (one, consensual – or believed to be), events that have fractured their sibling relationship. As we read on, we find out just how entangled Joshua is in the lives of his flock.

Two recent deaths are elided in the first chapter. Gark and Pell’s friend Lilly has been killed in grim circumstances that involve ‘body fluids and defence injuries’. And Cyrus Stanley is dead, or appears to be. A roadside memorial to him – an improvised cross ‘standing a metre tall … made from square steel tube with a slaggy weld on each side of the crossbar’ – has been planted at an intersection near the Stanleys’ house. And there’s evidence that links Cyrus to Lilly’s death. So, armed with a pair of their mother’s dressmaking scissors, Gark and Pell decide on mortal revenge against the Stanleys, but are ambushed in the process by Jeff and Turkey. Gark and Pell pivot to something more practical – they steal Cyrus’s cross instead. They can be seen running away at the end of the chapter, under shotgun fire, the Stanley brothers in hot pursuit. They then bear this cross – carry it, literally – for the rest of the novel while being chased across town. It is cartoonish to a degree but the novel’s mythic, surreal tone allowed me to park my disbelief. There’s a fair bit that goes unexplained. ‘Shame what happened to Ellie,’ a character says to Gark and Pell at one point. It’s all we are told about their mum’s ugly fate.

This book recalled for me two others as I read. The first was John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men. It might be superficial but I could never shake the detail of the characters’ height difference:

… two skinny, hungry boys living in a squat by a slow river. One was tall, and most people called him Pell. The other looked short beside Pell; he was older, and most people called him Gark … parasite bites round their ankles from the dirty place they lived.

Pell and Gark: through screwed eyes could they be George and Lennie in Steinbeck’s Great Depression-era novella? Certainly both pairs comprise displaced, disadvantaged characters subsisting on the edges of society. Fraternal love is also a shared theme.

The second is Michael Winkler’s Grimmish. This more relates to form. I do think The Cross Thieves is comparatively ambitious and (in part) batshit crazy. There is a joie de lire when you read something so original, an idiosyncratic work that could only have come from that author’s brain. Each features an obscure, strangely appropriated, real-life historical carny: the horseback circus performer May Wirth in Fyfe’s case; the bareknuckle boxer Joe Grim in Winkler’s. Wirth is a kind of totemic role model here: she’s a symbol of female power in Ellie and Mollie’s truth-telling correspondence; later in the story, she’s a riot grrl inspiration for a posse of younger women who go after the Stanleys.

Fyfe tells it slant and that’s even before I get to mention Joshua’s obsession with American rock band Starship’s cheesy banger ‘We Built This City’. He has a kinky crush on singer Grace Slick, you see. As well as reciting biblical passages at length – one for every occasion! – Joshua also mashes up lyrics from this, quite frankly bizarre, mid-eighties pop song. ‘Here were the capabilities of faith, brilliantly stated,’ he tells himself.

Fyfe has a good ear for regional dialect and adeptly gives demotic voice to various characters, blokes like drug dealers Cardo and Gulp. But this is not bogan lit, this novel rides on a higher plane. One of the metafictional aspects I enjoyed most was the tricksy unnamed first-person narrator who directly addresses the reader in certain chapters:

I’ve made it clear enough what Gark and Pell were doing that night: they were running for their lives after a stupid decision they had little idea how to patch up. But I said I was going to talk about what it was like to be them. Didn’t I ask you to have the right heart to hear it too? We can’t much trust each other if I don’t keep good to my word, nor can I ask much from you if I’m just another liar.

Not quite Nabokovian: too spade-is-a-spade. Who is talking here? We never find out, not that it mattered to me.

He has employed a chiastic structure for The Cross Thieves, or as Fyfe says in his acknowledgements, ‘a little known (and very old) structure called ring composition’. The novel comprises short chapters titled A, B, C, D, E, F – each a separate story arc and locus – which we then return to, in reverse order, in the corresponding chapters that follow, titled F, E, D, C, B, A. Don’t let that put you off however – you barely notice. This machine is well-oiled.

On the surface, The Cross Thieves is one long chase through town one night in late autumn, but more substantively, it is a swingeing critique of predatory and corrupt organised religion, and a hiding-in-plain-sight authorial plea for people on the margins suffering food insecurity. Gark and Pell can never take food for granted. Their existence on the breadline is precarious – ‘two bodies trying to get by on half a potato each in the past two days’ – a cherished baked potato that Gark makes sure to share with his younger brother Pell.

The Cross Thieves is the second in a planned trilogy of novels set in the Peel region, however this is a standalone book (notwithstanding mentions of a few recurring characters). It is much more experimental than the first instalment, T (2022), in both style and content. Fyfe inventively deploys an arcane first-person narrator here and pulls this off. It’s an ambitious craft choice that goes some way to differentiating this novel from the first. He still maintains his central themes of ‘violence, homelessness, and addiction’, although the impact of the methamphetamine drug trade is kept on low here. The blowtorch is instead applied to the hypocrisies and perniciousness of organised religions like the Noble Shepherd Ministry once they get their hooks into communities like Mandurah. It’s as much condemnation as satire.

Alan Fyfe The Cross Thieves Transit Lounge Publishing 2026 PB 208pp $32.99

Paul Anderson is studying for a Master of Arts in Literature and Creative Writing at Western Sydney University.

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