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When I told a friend I was thinking of writing an essay on pre-Hispanic literature he said, ‘Forget it. You’d have to go to university to find out how to write an essay. Why don’t you write about your Christmas holidays?’ So perhaps it’s polite to warn readers that the following words, observations, and ideas are derived solely from personal experience, reading and reflection. I am a genuine lay person, shamelessly uneducated, having left school at fifteen and not found the time (or funds) to return since. 

An interview with Martin Flanagan.

Metempsychosis is the transmigration of a soul at death into the body of another being. The plot of this novel turns neatly on an incident of metempsychosis. I don’t wish to explain what happens, because one of the charms of the book lies in that moment, and readers must be free to enjoy it.

Ten years ago historical novels were an unwanted rarity in Australian children’s publishing. Instead, there was a vogue for time-slip novels where a contemporary kid went travelling back into the past, as though history would be too hard for younger readers to handle without some sort of tour guide.

‘Lyrical Unification in Gambier’ a poem by John Kinsella

‘Down with Beauty! Long Live Death!’, a poem by Geoff Page

‘Praying with Christopher Smart’ a poem by Peter Steele

Early in Gail Jones’s novel Black Mirror (2002), an Australian artist dives into the Seine to retrieve a bundle that may contain a drowning baby. Before rising to the surface, she experiences a kind of epiphany in the face of possible death – ‘a willed dissolution, a corrupt fantasy of effacement’. Later she revisits the experience in dreams, swimming through a surrealist underworld of discarded bric-a-brac: plainly, a metaphor for dreaming itself, as an act of plunging into mental depths and searching for hidden treasures.