Twelve-year-old Jason Dalton lives with his mother in a tiny flat and dreams of playing for Hawthorn. A gifted player, he imagines himself ‘swaggering into school on Monday morning after playing at Princes Park on Saturday. Younger kids would crowd around him at recess. Girls would look at him.’ Football colours Jason’s days, offering him hope, solace, a way to belong.

Jason’s mother, a nurse, works night shifts at St Vincent’s Hospital and is reluctant to let him join the Hawthorn City Falcons (‘They’re too rough’), but eventually agrees. She says she will watch him play, but she never goes, and when he returns home after games he finds her in bed, ‘the back of her dark head just visible in the dim bedroom, submerged in her sheets and pillows’. Her attitude leaves Jason hurt and bewildered. When she eventually arrives at the end-of-season barbecue, everyone else has left. Her voice ‘struggles to find the right note’ as she congratulates him on his ‘best and fairest’ trophy: ‘You must be so proud.’

It is soon apparent that her ambivalence has traumatic origins. The ‘explosive family secret’ mentioned on the back cover, when finally revealed, is shocking, though not unexpected. Eleven Seasons grapples with many of the issues that seem ineluctably linked to the seedier aspects of the game. Although the novel is set in the 1980s and 1990s, the 2005 release of the AFL’s ‘Respect And Responsibility’ policy, and recent events, such as a Hawthorn legend’s charmless comments on Facebook, have illustrated to disconcerting effect the fact that some football players still have trouble ‘respecting’ women. This is certainly not a problem restricted to the AFL, or one that pertains to all those involved with the game, but it does seem to crop up with unsettling frequency. Eleven Seasons offers a nuanced fictional perspective.

Jason’s attitudes towards women are refreshingly complicated. Eager to please and protect those he loves, as a teenager he still has trouble understanding how to approach women, and his thoughts can shift from romantic to coarse in the space of a sentence. At one point, a young beer-fuelled Jason’s naïve and hard-won bravado finds him in a dark room with a girl at a party. She decides he’s moving too fast and tells him to stop. His response is genuinely confused but chilling: ‘“You came here with me,” he says. “What?”.’ Later, a moment in a brothel that might have seemed pathetic or exploitative offers a form of catharsis.

The characters in Eleven Seasons are convincing and well drawn. Carter’s female characters are fiercely independent, and Jason’s relationships with his mother, and later with his housemate Erin, are complex. Carter handles the intricate shorthand of friendship, family, love, and attraction with deft assurance. Even secondary characters are memorable, sometimes unsettlingly so, as their histories and futures are often only hinted at and their stories can feel unresolved. Especially poignant are the relationships that Jason develops with Daphne, a schoolmate who is ‘always alone, flitting between groups of people as if she’s under fire’, and later with Dundee, a Labrador abandoned by his owner to the not-so-tender mercies of Jason’s heartless housemate Barnaby.

Carter’s dialogue is convincing, his use of language agile. Jason’s ‘unattempted assignments spread up the walls of his school locker like fungi’; one night, returning home from gym, he ‘nudges’ into his room, his mother ‘moves about the flat as if her spine is made of glass’; and at a pub a girl’s ‘friends get louder but they talk in scribbly lines that don’t make sense and whenever he opens his mouth their expressions change, as if he’s slowing them down’.

Carter captures the spirit of Melbourne and the intimacy and grandeur of football in such a way that even someone who has never visited the city or attended a football match will be engaged. The relationships a supporter imagines with his favourite players are evocatively rendered: ‘When [Leigh Matthews] doesn’t play, Jason feels slighted, as though Lethal has stood him up.’ So too is ‘the brawling sound’ of the crowd at the MCG on Grand Final day (‘unrepeatable in the world outside’), and the overwhelming exuberance of a team’s premiership triumph: ‘Eighteen minutes later, after the Hawks have kicked seven more goals and broken the record-winning margin, the final siren sounds. Jason is standing on his seat when it happens and the crowd reaction almost lifts him into the sky. He raises his arms to God, his voice a static hiss. Victory.’

In the end, Eleven Seasons offers no simplistic resolutions – just an awareness of new possibilities as the siren begins the next quarter.