Boy Swallows Universe Study Guide

Boy Swallows Universe is partially autobiographical. Raised in the Brisbane suburb of Bracken Ridge, Dalton’s mother moved in with a man who, in interviews, Dalton has said had “more than one foot in the criminal underworld”—but that man was an important father figure to Dalton and his three older brothers. In addition to briefly being babysat by Arthur “Slim” Halliday, Dalton and his brothers also discovered a secret underground room with only a red telephone in it. Though Dalton never discovered what the telephone was for or who was on the other end, that mystery and his memories of Halliday ultimately became Boy Swallows Universe. But before beginning to write fiction (Boy Swallows Universe was Dalton’s first novel), Dalton worked as a journalist, first for The Courier-Mail and then as a staff writer for The Weekend Australian Magazine. He’s married and has two daughters. In 2020, Dalton published his second novel, All Our Shimmering Skies. He’s also written several nonfiction works, including a book about the First Fleet (the first English ships to travel to and colonize Australia).  

Boy Swallows Universe focuses on the drug trade in Australia, and specifically the import of heroin from the Golden Triangle. The Golden Triangle refers to an area in Southeast Asia where Thailand, Myanmar, and Laos’s borders meet. It includes the junction of two major rivers and is a mountainous jungle region. For decades, the area has been a major source of opiates and other drugs, which are smuggled across borders and then transported either by sea or post to various countries, including Australia. Though Eli doesn’t touch on it in his narration, this became a huge concern for the Australian government in the 1980s, in part because intravenous drug use—which is how heroin is commonly taken—was a contributing factor to the spread of the HIV/AIDS epidemic. Law enforcement and government offices in Australia came out with several plans to try to quell usage, but the plans were often criticized for further stigmatizing drug use and not getting people the help they needed. Another historical detail in the novel is Arthur “Slim” Halliday, who was a real person. The book records his exploits mostly accurately: he was first imprisoned in the Boggo Road prison (formally the Brisbane Prison) in 1939 and made two successful escape attempts from “Halliday’s Leap” in 1940 and 1946. He was briefly released but was imprisoned again in 1953 for killing a taxi driver.  Halliday consistently maintained that he was framed until his death from cancer in 1987.

Boy Swallows Universe was Trent Dalton’s first novel. His second, All Our Shimmering Skies, features a protagonist who, like Eli, is interested in good and evil; the novel also similarly features magical realism. While Boy Swallows Universe was written too late to formally be a part of the Australian grunge literature genre, it shares some characteristics with novels in the genre and the subgenre of drug literature. The genre often features young protagonists, like Eli, who grow up in low-income circumstances and focus their attention on urban drug use in Australian cities. Important novels in the genre include Helen Garner’s 1977 novel Monkey Grip and Luke Davies’s 1998 novel Candy: A Novel of Love and Addiction. Within the novel, Eli and Dad are interested in classic works like Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury and Henry Charrière’s Papillon. Eli also thinks often about Herman Melville’s famous novel Moby-Dick. Eli, Slim, and Alex all love a poem from The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, which is a translated collection of quatrains attributed to Omar Khayyám, a 11th- and 12th-century Persian astronomer and mathematician.