- This final novel of the recently deceased Australian author Andrew McGahan has a rather absurd premise. A mountain off the coast of Tasmania is twice the height of Everest. It's a 'Magic Mountain' with a fist-like shape at the summit named the 'hand of God'. Geologically it's a single cliff twenty-five kilometres high. It’s not your regular mountain at all really - it's an upturned tectonic plate, named the 'Wheel'.
- One of the world’s most powerful men, now a billionaire, was the first to climb and conquer this enigmatic feat of nature in 1974. And he has in recent years constructed a mansion blasted out of the rock at the top of Observatory Mount, the ‘Child of the Wheel’ ten kilometres from it. The billionaire’s name is Walter Richman. (RICHMAN? Seriously?)
- It’s a long story, 600 pages, but eventually it absolutely absorbs you and demands your time until the end.
- Frankly, at first I was tempted to bail. 150 pages in and I was bored. Where is this going, apart from some ‘mystery’ of the Agatha Christie variety - a group of people assembled together and then horrible things are inevitably going to happen?
- Where’s the social, political critique? Where are the underclass, the forgotten? Where’s the penetrating engagement with our contemporary world? Why write a book like this?
- But 200 pages in the focus on meaning starts to appear and the tension builds. The narrator is Rita, the daughter of the architect of the mansion. ‘...some moral sense within her was in revolt, as if she had witnessed something indecent...it was degenerate’. ‘Loathing filled her, not for his wealth, but for his ego, for the sheer vastness of his conceit’. ‘It was the intrusion of something man-made where mankind did not belong’. ‘Rage at that enormity flowed in storm waves from the mountain...retribution was coming’.
- Rita had authored a new-age book in 1995 about 'invisible non-human presences, non-human forms of consciousness, all around us in the landscape’. It was, and still is, a contentious proposition.
- ‘What crime had Richman committed upon the summit that the Wheel could not forgive? Or was it just the crime of standing there at all?’
- This is an airport action thriller, though undoubtedly a well written one, with a slow-building plot. As reviewer Andrew Fuhrmann wrote in The Saturday Paper, it’s a Stephen King novel. But it has a majesty that’s very impressive.
- McGahan must have spent an enormous amount of time researching the history and practice of mountain climbing. He includes so much detail on the equipment, preparation, organisational complexity, and dangerous nature of the sport. It’s presented in a very authoritative voice and brings the whole enterprise vividly to life.
- Definitely worth reading, perhaps during your summer holidays.
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