My Brother Jaz by Gideon Haigh

Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2024        ISBN 9780522880830

Those of you who have read my other reviews know that I consider Gideon Haigh to be the best current writer on the game of cricket in the world today - I have read many of his books with much pleasure. It's clear from those books that there is much more to Haigh than just cricket, as his other books about subjects as diverse as office culture and Doc Evatt also attest.

As for the personal Gideon Haigh, that has always been a cipher to his readers ("I was a journalist for more than a decade before I used a personal pronoun") - I knew he grew up in Geelong and barracked for the Cats, but apart from that knew very little.

I certainly was unaware, as I suspect were most of his readers, that he had a younger brother that was killed aged 17 in a road accident. My Brother Jaz is a very short book about the lingering pain and loss that such an event causes, how it affects a whole life, how it fades and yet never fades, and how Gideon Haigh dealt (or didn't deal) with his brother's death.

Haigh subsumed the tragedy into his work, ensuring that he never had a spare hour. He forsook most of life's pleasures - love, alcohol, sport, music - for a decade. Most importantly, he never revisited or discussed his brother's death with anyone, even his mother. Until, after the dissolution of a romantic relationship, during the Sydney Test in 2024, over the course of 72 hours, he wrote what became the text of this book.

It is a compelling and searing record of how a seismic event ripples through a whole life, and how there is never a "correct" way to deal with the repercussions. Denying or trying to hide it doesn't work, and creates other problems (in Haigh's case intransigence and lack of feeling), but therapy and drugs aren't fully effective either (anti-depressants work to get over the initial shock but not the longer term pain, therapy can turn into rounds of saying the same thing over and over).

Haigh is honest enough to wonder if writing this book will be any more effective than other strategies, but after years of denial suddenly felt the urge to go back, dissect the day of his brother's death and the life leading up to it, and his responses over time. There are no prescriptions for others in this book, it is a catalogue of one person's grief and loss, and all the more powerful for that.

I am old enough to have lost people that mean a lot to me, some at the "right" time, and some before their time, but I have never felt the pain of losing a sibling or a parent. Reading Haigh's book made me wonder about my ancestors, all of whom lost siblings to war or other accidents, and how they must have felt. It's sobering.

This is a book to read in a sitting - it's powerful and emotional. Highly recommended.

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell