‘Australia is all an illusion. A trick with smoke and mirrors, performed by demagogues and balladeers.’ So says Paul Walters, one of A.L. McCann’s main characters in this black, sometimes bleak, but very readable tale of Melbourne monstrosity and madness at the turn of the twentieth century. The White Body of Evening is sprinkled with such sentiments, uttered behind chilled hands into penurious South Melbourne, intoned at middle-class tables down the road in St Vincent Place, and wanly ruminated over in the superior cultural environs of Vienna. McCann revels in the detail, and his map of ‘Marvellous Melbourne’ is rich with it: there are the Anatomical Curiosities on exhibit in Bourke Street’s Eastern Arcade; the understated shopfronts on Elizabeth Street, where disreputable booksellers specialise in the subjects of syphilis and sexual pathology; the Little Lonsdale stretch where tawdry prostitutes corrupt white-collar working men; and the numerous alleyways where fishmongers’ refuse washes in the gutters, and cadaverous human specimens occupy shadowy doorways.

The members of the Walters family exist above this sea of human flotsam and jetsam, but are variously drawn to it, revealing their less attractive qualities. Whether intentional or not, McCann’s novel is short on likeable characters. It is as if the Melbourne air instils a particular nastiness and noxiousness in its inhabitants. Perhaps the most innocuous character is the figure of Anna, the pale-faced German wife, ravaged nightly by her tortured husband until delivered from such obligations by his suicide. Her second husband, Dr Winton (abortionist turned respectable doctor) is initially suspect, with his sharp little teeth and immaculately trimmed beard, but he proves himself to be a ‘good man’, if nothing else. Paul, Anna’s son, has something uncomfortably desperate about him, which holds us at arm’s length, even when we are made privy to the vagaries of his inner life. Paul’s sister Ondine, meanwhile, is a blonde-haired ice queen, vacuous despite her powers of seduction – a ‘vision of the ideals for which men fight’. (Paul’s idolatrous love of her veers away from the sticky and incestuous just in time.)