- What propels this powerful novel is Papathanasiou's rage. It's white hot and it explodes in brilliant, graphic and fiery prose with a relentless and mesmerising beat to it. And it's dotted with breathtaking similes: The trees, once lush, became empty hatstands; A scatter of white cockatoos spread themselves across the sky like a throw of salt crystals; His frame sunk with gravity, expanded, like a blob of jelly released from its mould.
- This is a raw political novel at its core, not just a crime story, although its two dimensions are integrated seamlessly. Papathanasiou is critiquing the ugly racism of Australia. Reading the novel is like drowning in an ugly cesspit. It depicts humanity at its worst. An immigration detention centre is located on the edge of the outback town of Cobb. It is full of camel jockeys, sand niggers, terrorists, rapists and peadoes, according to the locals. But Papathanasiou takes us inside the facility at various points in the novel and we see it for what it fundamentally is - a cruel and miserable institution set up by government and outsourced to private enterprise, ex-military, drug running thugs. The asylum seekers are rendered sympathetically and the stories of two of them in particular are heartbreaking.
- The narrative is littered with cliched Australiana: heat, roos, birds, possums, insects, pubs, weary cynical police, lingo like ‘mate’, ‘bugger’. The town is a caricature. There are two pubs in the town, one for white drunks, the other an aboriginal ‘shithole’. The ugliness of the beer swilling, racist men is over egged. It’s almost comic. But I think it's deliberate. Papathanasiou is portraying an Australian version of Dante's Inferno. This is not so much outback noir as outback horror in the Kenneth Cook Wake in Fright tradition.
- The terrain is so familiar: isolated county town, murder, city cop with baggage, dopey racist and misogynistic locals, cheap accommodation, economic devastation, eucalypts dying of the drought, rabbits dying with myxomatosis. Everything is in decay. Even the roos are angry. We've been here plenty of times before but Papathanasiou has lifted the genre to a whole new level. This is the best it's ever going to get.
- I cannot recommend this novel highly enough. It's superb, and you will never forget it.
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