The novel is set in Sydney. Some Kiwi characters play a part in the story, but this is essentially a story about criminality and corruption in a city that's seen plenty of that since the days of the NSW Rum Corps in the early 1800s. Everyone's on the take, the police, the dockers, suppliers, landlords, the city's Italian community - the lot.
It is a story about relationships and, in some cases, of redemption. The central figure, Johno (who has some Maori ancestry) has a criminal father and grandfather. We meet him first as a teenager, then as a young man as he embarks on a life of crime with his best mate, Shane. Johno reforms himself through parenthood and as a businessman, but Shane, another key character, goes back behind bars and does not meet up with Johno again until near the end of the book.
Johno's other, more powerful, relationship is with his sensitive, artistic son Danny, dumped on him by his wife soon after Johno's release from prison. From the stress of unexpected single parenting grows a deep and centring relationship.
Danny is the other anchor to the book, forming a growing bond with his father but also, initially to the puzzlement and frustration of the latter, with a poetry-quoting alcoholic vagrant carrying his life around in a supermarket trolley, the owner of the scungy, smelly grey coat that gives the book its title and who wears it ''like a royal robe''.
Frederick and another elderly odd-sort, Wilson, nurture Danny's interest in art. At first Johno has his doubts, but to his credit, he supports what he does not necessarily fully understand.
''Danny's Drawings'' becomes the name of the bar/restaurant that forms the basis of his rehabilitation.
If Johno proves that you can, with effort, escape your past, Frederick is the opposite. Despite his warmth and intelligence, the combination of clinical depression and alcoholism drags him down.
Frederick's Coat is not chick lit. It's gritty and key characters meet gruesome ends, but most of the violence happens offstage, discussed rather than portrayed viscerally. The crims and ex-crims in this book inhabit an overwhelmingly homophobic and misogynistic world. Being gay is just about the worst thing that can happen to a mate or son.
Female characters are peripheral and are, with a couple of exceptions mostly negative people: Johno's wife, Evelyn, who splits, taking daughter Leah and leaving Johno with Danny; or Johno's wife, whom Danny had been told was dead, but who makes an unexpected appearance on his doorstep, heavily the worse for wear after years as a junkie.
The evils of addiction, especially drugs, run through the entire book. In the Q&A session added to the publicity material sent with the review copy, Duff says he's pushing a ''don't let alcohol-turn-you-ugly-message'' and that he's ''anti class-A drugs''.
Earlier, he states ''my editors can tell you I have to be dragged off my high horse on certain subjects such as welfare dependency''.
He's generally more subtle than that but you're never in any doubt about his views.
''So where do two willing young would-be crooks get started? At the bottom that's where,'' he says near the beginning of the book when Johno and Shane decide to take the same path as their elders. Johno drinks sparingly and can't abide even marijuana.
Does Frederick's Coat work?
Mostly. It's certainly a page-turner. I read it within two days of getting it. I wasn't entirely convinced by the relatively brief account of the process of Danny's downfall, but Johno, Danny and Frederick come across as fairly full, convincing characters and the message that, with extreme discipline, some people at least can escape their backgrounds is uplifting.
- Gavin McLean is a Wellington historian.
