This semi-autobiographical novel, definable as a roman à clef, follows the narrator, David Meredith, through his childhood and adolescence in interwar Melbourne through to adulthood and his prominent career as a journalist during World War II, to his life on a Greek island in the 1950s and 60s.
David's childhood and early life are influenced heavily by the destructive presence of his father, psychologically ruined by his experiences in the Great War. His father, cruel, increasingly withdrawn, is a catalyst for the escapes which both David and Jack have to make, each in their own way.
The novel has a central theme using contrasts between David and his older and more "typically Australian", brother, Jack. Where David is tentative, even passive, as a boy, Jack is fearless, engaging head-on with the world around him. "You've got to have a go, nipper," Jack says to David early in the novel.
As they get older, Jack exhibits solid qualities of loyalty and grit while David betrays friendships and family in his progress to success.
David's friend at The Morning Post in Melbourne, Gavin Turley, sums up this aspect of David's character, and indeed the journey the book describes, in Chapter 12.[5] First in a comment to Helen:
One thing you should know and always remember. There is no guarantee in him, my dear. There is no guarantee.
And later in explanation to David himself:
...you will have to go on and on in your own strange solitary way, too far from your own wilderness ever to go back to it, beating and bashing and cheating and striving towards some goal which up to now, I swear, you have never yet glimpsed.
The life of David Meredith has many parallels with the life of his creator, George Johnston. They were contemporaries, both growing up in the interwar years in suburban Melbourne, in families tainted by the horror of war, both finding writing to be their métiers. Both had short first marriages, both fell in love with younger women who became second wives, both had successful careers as war correspondents. Both lived bohemian lives on a Greek island. And of course, both had a brother called Jack.
In reviewing the novel in 2014, fifty years after its original publication, Paul Daley in The Guardian asks the reader to "look beyond the obvious autobiography and the family roman à clef, and discover the novel’s real strength – a daring iconoclasticism that challenges pervasive assumptions about Australian character, values and suburban complacency."[6]
My Brother Jack is nothing if not a powerfully candid post-war cultural and social commentary. But it’s also a timeless allegory about the foibles of selfish ambition and material security and a dissertation on what Johnston saw as the vacuousness of suburban satisfaction. It challenges the “suburban dream”, another of the great cultural pillars – the primary one being the Anzac legend – upon which Australian character supposedly stands.
