Early 20th Century Melbourne. When an awkward, diminutive twelve-year old boy faces up to a bully, he discovers that for him there is nothing sweeter than the pleasure of punching someone. He discovers simultaneously that he has an irresistible urge to write poetry. These two urges shape his life, as he goes from prison to the battlefields of Palestine, then, finally, into the boxing ring. What follows is a career of professional boxing throughout which he is plagued not only by pain, but by the knowledge that he is a must fight dirty to survive, and by an inner poetic voice which commands him to write, to his shame.
Throughout his ordeal, which comes to shape his life and his relationship, his fame as a poet grows, yet it is at the expense of anonymity, which he adopts out of his irrational certainty that only a weak man could be a poet, and that he will lose face as a fighter if he is exposed. Eventually comes the unravelling.
An Ill-fitting Man is a brave and captivating novel about a man who seems to be fit for nothing and greatness at the same time.
"Another classic of Australian literature with the same sharpness as Twohig's previous novels."