All In

Gambling and the novel have always been comfortable bedfellows: many a compelling tale has utilised this often glamorous but frequently dangerous and murky world as a backdrop. This powerful first novel by Mitchell Symons is considerably more than a conventional novel. In fact, the book that seems to lie behind All In is Luke Rhinehart's The Dice Man, in which a man's life is predicated on a series of random choices. This is a novel of character in extremis, and the protagonist Steve will either save his own life by his gambling--or end it.

Stephen is a compulsive gambler, and there's nothing he will not tackle. His reluctance to stop is not just costing him money: he is finding that it is becoming more and more difficult to lie to his wife about his debts. Taking stock Steve decides to place the ultimate bet. Steve's luck has always been widely erratic, but now that he has made an irrevocable choice, he is plunged into a sinister and terrifying world.

All of this is chronicled by Symons in prose that is raw and rough-edged (yet often very funny), with the atmospheric milieu that Steve staggers through rendered with a reporter's sharp eye, and the characters that Steve encounters have none of the eccentric charm of Damon Runyon's gamblers: the stakes here are often deadly. The real achievement of the novel, though, is the brilliantly created diary format in which Symons couches his narrative, with the dialogue always having a caustic and mordant edge: There's a kind of snowball effect when you start winning: the other players become wary, fearful even, and it just helps contribute to success. Confidence is the antithesis of fear and, just as stronger players close in on a frightened player, so too do weaker players cower in the presence of a strong man. It's a benign circle--or whatever the opposite of a vicious circle is. --Barry Forshaw


Genre: Literary Fiction