When Jimmy’s mum, Paula, is taken to hospital following an asthma attack, Jimmy and his dad spend the afternoon building a go cart from scraps and racing it down the hill, and later holiday together with Jimmy’s uncle by the beach. While the story is a dark one, Laguna fills her narrative with small moments of love and joy. Obsessed with instruction manuals, Jimmy is certain he can put all the pieces back together if only he can figure out the connections between them. Winner of the 2015 Miles Franklin Literary Award, The Eye of the Sheep is a story of broken systems: rusty pipes, clogged airways, failed communications, relationships turned rotten and government departments under strain. The world has always seemed strange to Jimmy, full of situations just beyond his grasp, but when the flame at the end of the refinery pipe in the empty field behind the Flicks’ house at Nineteen Emu gutters, even the routines and domestic machinery he relies on begin breaking down, one by one.
Jimmy’s only friend is his elder brother, Robby, but Robby is growing up fast and soon there isn’t room for him and his dad under the same roof. His dad works at the nearby refinery scraping rust from the pipes and drinking himself to violence on Friday nights, while his mother suffers severe asthma, her airways clogged with dust.
The Eye of the Sheep is the story of Jimmy Flick, a young boy with special needs growing up in a family on the verge of falling apart in Melbourne’s outer suburbs. It burns right at the back of the head and it never goes out, no matter what happens to the sheep. If you look deep into the eye of a sheep you can see a light. Margot McGovern reviews The Eye of the Sheep ( Allen & Unwin) by Sofie Laguna.
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