- This debut novel is a stylish, intoxicating and mysterious work that combines various narrative threads exceptionally well. They are at first seemingly unrelated but fuse into a satisfying and meaningful whole in the novel's final chapters.
- The characters' names are multicultural and exotic: while there's Cameron, Maddison, Charles and Felix, there's Dhiya, Ajak, Tane, Jhon and Bishal.
- Bryer explores the creative process in its many dimensions, and her experience as a translator shines through, translation being defined as not just a language process but a real re-creation of the original.
- Eventually the focus is on modern Australia. ‘From here on, monsters’ is an unknown cartographer’s description in 1504 of the imagined inhabitants of the Antipodes. The Aboriginal occupation, society and culture of the Great South Land is erased by the European colonisers. Who, exactly, are the monsters?
- Our 'official' description of today's migrants/asylum seekers is ‘Illegal Maritime Arrivals’. Truth in reporting is being censored. Things disappear - characters, words, events, scenes, views, facts. Meaning fades.
- One character asks at one point ‘When do you think we’ll be able to see again?’
- The ending is at first confusing, but highly suggestive. Art needs to rise to the occasion, cut through, tell the ugly truth, and change things. Not be a meaningless exercise in narcissistic wankery.
(Shaun Prescott, author of the wonderful novel The Town, is quoted on the back cover and he gets it so right: 'Traverses the chasm between truth and history, and challenges our faith in the liberatory potential of art. It's a modern Australian novel about modern Australia that, refreshingly, doesn't read at all like a modern Australian novel'.
And Bryer quotes the Japanese poet Issa translated by Czeslaw Milosz:
To know and not to speak.
In that way one forgets.
What is pronounced strengthens itself.
What is unpronounced tends to non-existence.)
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