- I’ve never been a great fan of experimental fiction. James Joyce's Ulysses was the best I could do, and there's no way I'd ever attempt Finnegans Wake. I found this debut novel by Brisbane author Nicholas John Turner difficult, yet strangely compelling. By the end I’d grown to like it. I’d been sucked in, enchanted by its spell.
- It proceeds like a slow burn, with a low hum - multiple voices, multiple stories, multiple locations and countries, with a reflective, philosophical, frequently academic, tenor. As one character reflects ‘...a stereotypical introduction to the intellectual scratching of an existential itch’.
- My colleague, former bookseller and now literary agent and, let me proffer, modernist, Martin Shaw, is enthusiastic about this book so I felt obliged to read it.
- It has a flatness in style. There’s virtually no dialogue, and only occasionally a light humorous touch.
- Psychological and psychiatric issues dominate. These are not confessions or stories of or about ‘normal’ people. Madness, nightmares, anxieties, dangers, strangers - nothing is settled or quotidian. Meaningless sex and masturbation abound as characters desperately attempt to connect in circumstances that offer only superficial or temporary order. But the author stays very much in control. The pace is maintained, the journey developing, the writing superb.
- Some stories are impenetrable, but others clear and compelling. The story of Art and Jennifer (ch 7) for example is superb. As a whole the novel has an absurdist edge to its general nihilism, as it builds in power. Thin tendrils, barely visible, connect the individual stories and are made clear in the end.
- One thing about Turner's style struck me - he is obsessed with the physical appearances of all his characters, major or minor. Constant descriptions of hairs, skin marks, body shapes, facial features, teeth, weight, etc. Eg ‘...a sack of loose skin hung out of her armpit like a turkey’s neck and was pinched and strangled red’ (66). ‘A white plaque or scum was building along the flanks of her tongue and in her gums, and tiny bunches of bubbled spittle were sitting on her molars’ (68). (You can sense the rhythm in just those two sentences).
- This is a writer with an enormous gift. He'll be huge one day, no doubt at all.
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