The Sons of Clovis starts off at a good clip – David Brooks addresses the reader cheekily straight off and promises a whole lot of rollicking adventure – and keeps it up throughout. Enamoured of his subject (the real story behind the Ern Malley Hoax) he delivers on his promise, taking readers on an extensive journey to Europe and America, through the history of literary hoaxes – here in Australia and abroad – via the French Symbolists, Eliot, Pound and Frank O’Hara and back through war-time Melbourne and Sydney, opening doors to new avenues of scholarship on the topic along the way.

Brooks addresses the fact that the poems have never been read closely due to their status as hoax. In The Sons of Clovis he remedies that, tracing their literary genealogy through Baudelaire and Mallarmé among others, and making a strong argument in favour of the poems’ contribution to the French Symbolist movement in Australian poetry, at the same time questioning the hoaxers’ motives. Is it possible that the poems were not just a lark created haphazardly in a single afternoon to demonstrate their disdain for experimental poetry (as the hoaxers stated), but an important turning point in their own literary processes, and the end result of a rather involved poetic process involving allusion, the use of framing devices and extensive rewriting? Why does a writer choose to use a pseudonym or a ‘mask’, or to concoct a hoax?

More than anything, Brooks is excited by his topic, and in dissecting it he covers a lot of ground, moving through psychology, literature, philosophy and culture seamlessly, using an engaging narrative voice to carry the interested reader along for the ride.

Ed Moreno is from Readings Carlton