Orpheus Lost

Janette Turner Hospital's Orpheus Lost blurs the boundaries between dream, fantasy, wish and reality. She reflects our experience of consciousness: the lightning subconscious responses to events and people around us and the twister that is our understanding of them. This is an intriguing tale written with a deft and technically sure hand. The beautiful language entranced me even as the story terrified me.

Like Richard Flanagan's The Unknown Terrorist an innocent is drawn into a web of inescapable bonds and condemned by a string of circumstantial events and meetings. False logic sucks him into a vortex of half-truths and short circuited connections.

The three main characters and their backgrounds are drawn with a sensitive pen. Despite the seeming madness of their families - don't all families have some nugget of madness, save yours and mine.....? - they emerge to triumph in their chosen fields but fail at a critical point, when the madness of terrorism and the response to it overwhelms them.

Mishka's desire to find his father and unwind the mystery of his own identity draws him into the underworld of the Middle East and terrorism. He is the Orpheus who looks back at his Eurydice and gives himself away, damning all to uncertainty and violence.

This lyrical but powerful novel will capture and disturb you.