It’s been several years since Steve Toltz published his sprawling debut, A Fraction of the Whole, and readers awaiting another dosage of fierce iconoclasm and dark-peppered wit will not be disappointed. With every bit of rambling dialogue and hilarious anecdote, Quicksand resembles Toltz’s previous epic because the stories quickly amount to a catalogue of catastrophes. Our two remarkably unlucky, down-and-out protagonists are both failures whose lives are entangled through lifelong friendship and dependence.

Liam Wilder, unsuccessful writer-come-policeman has been bailing his friend Aldo Benjamin out of scrapes for years. A disastrous entrepreneur, Aldo has been impoverishing friends, family and investors his entire life, collecting an array of specialists around him to combat his latest medical, legal, criminal, emotional or financial disaster. Liam realises that he is just one part of this human arsenal and it’s not until Aldo is a convicted criminal, crippled and suicidal that he sees his chance: he will write an epic tale of woe about his friend, thus releasing his own creative paralysis. From this perspective Liam narrates the years of hilarious misfortune and ruminates constantly on a book written by their secondary-school art teacher, Mr Morrell.

A cantankerous and eccentric man, Morrell wrote a treatise on art called Artist Within, Artist Without and Liam quotes it ostensibly. Wonder about art and creation simmers throughout the three-part book, making events tragic and comic, but things only become clearer near the end when Liam returns to narrate. Aldo tells the second part of the book at pace, but he is someone who never shuts up, and even though his turn of phrase ignites each page, it can often be a slog to get to the punch. Regardless, Toltz has given us something brilliant to marvel at again.

Luke May is a freelance reviewer.