Jack Ross: Opinions: Party Boy (2026)

Tuesday

Party Boy (2026)

NZ Listener, vol.299, no. 4439 (21-27/2/2026)

Breton Dukes. Party Boy. ISBN 978-1-776923-03-8. Wellington: Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2026. 320 pp.

Breton Dukes: Party Boy (2026)

Ghosts at the Party

Dark-humoured novel explores the splintering life of a Dunedin man tormented by what he did in his school days

What becomes of school bullies? Do they go on to prosperous afterlives, secure in their invincible lack of empathy? Or do their misdeeds lurk within, growing steadily in the dark until they eventually emerge to sabotage everything?

Marco Siddle has a secret. Or, rather, a series of secrets which gradually emerge in the course of this painfully detailed novel.

We begin at the Dunedin bar where he works two shifts a week as a short-order cook. He bustles about, dicing this, squeezing that, putting the other on to boil until the orders begin to come in – slowly at first, then with horrifying speed.

For a while Marco can keep up the pretence of being on top of things, but it soon becomes clear that something’s out of kilter: plates aren’t going out; people aren’t being served. So desperate does he become that he has to burn his own hand in a sink full of boiling water to find a way out.

What’s really going on, you see, is that he’s just received an email from someone who went to the same school, who says that he’d like to talk to him about what went on in the Seventh Form at Otago Boys’ High.

It’s nothing to worry about – I’m just after information, just wanting to get a full picture of the school back in the day!

Party Boy is a novel about evasion: refusing to acknowledge or revisit the past for fear that it will destroy what you’ve built up since. However fragile it may appear from the outside – a dead-end job, a disillusioned wife, three demanding sons – that’s all Marco’s got. Apart for a plentiful supply of drugs and booze, that is.

It’s a novel about evasion, but it’s also a novel that embodies evasion. Some of Marco’s deep dives into the past are nearly novella-length in themselves: we learn of his cold, unloving parents; a bizarre confrontation with a dog he had as a young boy; an even more bizarre one-night stand which led to his abandoning his date’s young son in a forest; until eventually we find out a bit about what did go down at Otago Boys’ High.

Breton Dukes’ strength as a writer – he is the author of three short story collections – lies less in his impressively immersive approach to narrative than in the flashes of wit that lighten the darkness. This, for example, as Marco half-leads, half-carries his boys home from school up a very steep hill, having had to abandon the car he’d forgotten to top up with petrol earlier in the day:

he worried he’d topple, end up like an insect turned over on the path. Would the kids help at that point? Or just drip spit in his eyes?

The kids in question are 4, 6, and 8.

Then there’s the apocalyptic Fiftieth Birthday Party Marco insists on throwing for himself, which includes a long confession of his misdeeds to a crowd of half-forgotten old friends, and culminates in a spasmodic fit of vomiting. Just as his long-suffering wife Michelle has finished hosing him down in the bathroom, she “came back and said. ‘Move it along, we’ve got a new spew-master coming in.’”

Does the author let Marco off a bit easy? It would be possible to think so. In the end, it may come down to whether you were a bully or one of the bullied at school. Otago Boys’ High, if it was anything like Dukes’ description, does sound as if it went a bit beyond the norm of everyday brutality prevalent at most New Zealand schools.

There’s an interesting aside about that in the author’s Acknowledgements. He explains, to the “twenty-five or so old boys, from many different eras, of Otago Boys’ High School who I interviewed in 2022”:

Most likely this is not the book you imagined … Bullying, homophobia, the culture of conformity, violence at the hostel – in the end it was all too grim. I couldn’t commit to spending the requisite time in such dark places.

What does he choose to do instead? Marco’s misdeeds end up being largely forgiven and forgotten by those who hear about them: after all, how was he to know that the boy whose bare bottom he publicly beat with a plastic hose would go on – possible spoiler here – to commit suicide two days later?

It might have been better just to leave that hanging. I’m not sure we need the epilogue. Why reward Marco with a prosperous old age, unless you mean to signal that that’s what happens when you get such things off your chest? True, one of the boys has a substance abuse problem like his dad, but now he’s quitting: he didn’t like “what he got into when he was drunk.”

All the while, though, Marco’s victim Graeme Sanderson lies in the cold grave, forgotten by the juggernaut of history. But perhaps that’s the point.