AustLit

'This is a rather extraordinary first novel. It is written in a style that ravishes the reader because it is constantly inventive and nervily inflected with a maximum suggestiveness. Ronnie Scott is superb at capturing the intimations and innuendos that any human heart – perhaps especially a not fully formed, post-adolescent one – is capable of. He is as good at evoking a world of young men who are a bit in love with, certainly not uninterested in, each other. But The Adversary is too talented a piece of debut fiction to be received with hands-off courtesy. The besetting problem of this putative novel that everyone should have a look at – to cotton on to a writer who has a wizardly quicksilver command of language – is that not enough happens in the book, and the author’s apparent belief that it does comes to seem like naivety.' (Introduction)

'One of the few details we learn about the unnamed narrator of Ronnie Scott’s début novel, The Adversary, is that he is fond of Vegemite. Although only a crumb of information, this affinity for the popular breakfast tar reveals much about our hero. Just as Vegemite ‘has to be spread very thin or you realised it was salty and unreasonable’, his human interactions give him a soupçon of a social life, a mere taste that never threatens to overwhelm his senses.'  (Introduction)

'Reading Ronnie Scott’s (of The Listed Brow esteem) debut novel ‘The Adversary’ struck me with its wistful immediacy. A kind of sentimentality that made me simultaneously longing and repellent for my days of inner-city sharehouse living, in all its messy, hellish finitude. Yet, it was the complicated politics of gay friendship and companionships that were intriguing as they were foreign to me (as a sedentary, hetero-homebody) that kept my mind occupied until long after it had drawn its conclusions.' (Introduction)