Andrew McGahan

Several years ago, on two separate occasions, Drusilla Modjeska and David Marr called for Australian fiction writers to address directly the state of the country in its post-9/11 incarnation. ‘I have a simple plea to make,’ said Marr in the Redfern Town Hall in March 2003, delivering the annual Colin Simpson Lecture: ‘that writers start focusing on what is happening in this country, looking Australia in the face, not flinching … So few Australian novels – now I take my life in my hands – address in worldly, adult ways the country and the time in which we live. It’s no good ceding that territory to people like me – to journalists. That’s not good enough.’

Andrew McGahan’s final book, The Rich Man’s House, opens with an apology. ‘It’s a finished novel – I wouldn’t be letting it out into the world if it wasn’t – but I can’t deny that my abrupt decline in health has forced the publishers and I to hurry the rewriting and editing process extremely, and that this is not quite the book it would have been had cancer not intervened … 

The second in the Ship Kings series has a cinematic feel and shares the first-rate quality of the first book. Set in a fantasy world where island folk live in unsettled peace under the ruling mariner class, it continues the tale of Dow Amber as he sets off on a sailing adventure aboard the battleship Chloe. He and the unusual scapegoat girl Ignella are the only outsiders aboard the Ship Kings’ vessel as it embarks on a voyage into the northern icy seas, seeking the lost son of the Sea Lord.

Every book implicitly asks its reader a question: What am I? Sometimes this is an easy question to answer, but at other times, as with Andrew McGahan’s new novel, one must reply, ‘I have no idea; I’ve never seen anything like you before.’

The setting of Wonders of a Godless World is an old hospital housing the mad. Somehow the old-fashioned notion of ‘madness’ suits this story; it’s the word McGahan uses most often to describe the patients, and there is more than a whiff about this isolated hospital of the medieval Narrenschiff – the Ship of Fools. The hospital is under a volcano on a tropical island with a harbour city. We are not told the names of any of these places, and, like everything and everyone else in this book, its heroine also has no name; rather, she is identified, as are all the other characters, by her defining characteristic, and is thus exclusively referred to as ‘the orphan’. Other key characters are identified by their roles in a mundanely realistic way: the police captain, the old doctor, the night nurse. Still others have labels more redolent of fairytale and myth: the duke, the witch, the archangel, the virgin. And then there is the mastermind and perhaps the villain of the piece: the foreigner. As far as archetypal characters and symbolic settings are concerned, this book contains an embarrassment of riches, and the fact that none of them is individually identified or named means that all kinds of significance can be projected onto them.

‘White’ and ‘earth’ are not words that sit easily together in an Australian context, so much so that placing them thus seems almost deliberately unsettling. Juxtaposed, they only serve to remind us of things that are mostly too hard for us to look at directly, a claim to a possession all know to be ill-founded ...