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Reviews From the Archive

An occasional series, retrieving unpublished reviews from my journals 1997-2007

The catalyst for retrieving this review at this time is that Sue at Whispering Gums has just posted a review of ‘The Insiders’, a short story by Janet Turner Hospital. I have two unpublished reviews of JTH’s novels, Due Preparations for the Plague (2003) and Orpheus Lost (2007) but though I liked them both, I’ve chosen this one because it made such a strong impression on me.

Only a year after Richard Flanagan’s The Unknown Terrorist, came Orpheus Lost by Janet Turner Hospital, and though JTH’s is an infinitely better novel, it’s no coincidence that these two authors were writing about issues arising from Western governments’ responses to 9/11.  By the middle of that decade there was deep disquiet around the world about the human rights of those suspected of terrorism. The legitimate fear of mass casualties from Al Qaeda’s attacks had led to practices previously abhorred by the West: torture, detention without trial, the abrogation of habeas corpus; imprisonment under inhumane conditions; an excess of covert surveillance; and the suspension of legal representation for suspects on the grounds of national security.  Public panic was exploited by politicians, effectively silencing all objections.  Authors who spoke out against all this were rare.

This is the blurb for Orpheus Lost:

Leela is a mathematician who has escaped her Southern hometown to study in Boston. She meets an Australian musician, Mishka, and from the moment she first hears him play his music grips her; they quickly become lovers. Then one day Leela is picked up off the street and taken to an interrogation centre somewhere outside the city. There has been an explosion in the subway; terrorism is suspected. The interrogator—an old childhood friend—now reveals to her that Mishka may not be all he seems. In this compelling reimagining of the Orpheus story, Leela travels into an underworld of kidnapping, torture, and despair in search of her lover. Janette Turner Hospital, whose works are “richly imbued with a highly lyrical and luminous quality” (San Diego Union-Tribune) again shows her genius, interweaving a literary thriller with a story of passion and the triumph of decency in confusing and dangerous times.

Orpheus Lost, by Janet Turner Hospital, first published 2007

From my reading journal, dated 22nd July, 2007

This was a gripping novel.  Leela, from ‘Paradise Land’ in the US Bible Belt meets Jewish-Lebanese Mishka Bartok from the Daintree Rainforest, and they fall in love.  They are both students in Boston: she’s doing the maths of music and he’s doing the music of the Middle East.  They make a lot of passionate love.

But Mishka goes to a mosque (to hear their music) and meets a man who says he recognises him as the son of a radical Islamist.  This is the catalyst for Mishka, who has never known his father, and whose grandparents are Holocaust survivors, to set off for Baghdad with a false passport.  This is because his identity is fragile and he thinks that finding his missing father will help him to resolve who he really is. He realises that he may not like his father or what he stands for (especially because as a fundamentalist, his father would abhor music), but Mishka feels that he needs to know.

Into this messy situation comes Cobb Slaughter, a childhood ‘friend’ of Leela, the son of a veteran of the Iraq war, and a private security consultant.  He’s a gung-ho military man with a penchant for summary justice and torture.  Slaughter becomes suspicious of these visits to the mosque and Mishka’s association with suspected terrorists.  When Mishka disappears, he gets Leela arrested and has Mishka ‘renditioned’, a practice by which the Americans send their suspects to friendly nations who are less squeamish about torture, to do their dirty work for them.

It was a bit grim reading these scenes so soon after watching the violence inflicted on the Resistance by the Nazis in the film ‘Black Book’ [released in 2006, see the trailer here.] JTH writes fragments of text from different times and places interspersed with Misha’s memories and fears and real-time torture in the underground cells formerly belonging to Saddam Hussein. It is disorientating — and very effective at conveying poor Mishka’s confusion and agony at the hands of the guardians of the War on Terror.

BEWARE: SPOILERS

JTH is too good a novelist to portray Cobb Slaughter as an unequivocal villain.  He is a crazy mixed-up man who has fruitlessly fancied Leela since they were young together in Promised Land.  His motivation for pursuing Mishka to Baghdad is never quite clear.  Perhaps it’s to exercise his power of life and death; perhaps it’s a realisation that he can never be a man that Leela could love.

The scary themes in this novel include the willingness of the spooks to interpret naïve actions as suspicious, and once tainted by such suspicions, the innocent find it almost impossible to convince the authorities otherwise, as Dr Muhamed Haneef found to his cost when he was accused by Australian authorities of aiding terrorists. It’s also alarming to note the capacity of the authorities to have a difficult person ‘disappear’ and to have other embassies willing to acquiesce in it.  Orpheus Lost shows the cheapness of life and the helplessness of ordinary people caught up in this kind of incident, to deal with it in an effective way.  Justice ought not to depend on having an intercessor both determined and lucky.

Orpheus Lost inverts the Orpheus myth so that it is the man who is captive in the Underworld and his lover brings him back to life.  The relationship between Mishka, Leela and Slaughter is more central to the narrative than the plot, and the dreamlike fragments of thought and memory focus on feelings rather than events (which can cause some confusion for readers.)  But Mishka’s experiences mean that his life can never be the same.  He is a broken man unlikely ever to make music again. There is no banal happy ending after what’s happened. It’s not just Orpheus who is lost, it’s also the values that we purport to hold dear.

As Sue noted in her review, JTH is interested in how human beings negotiate dark matter.  That is a question relevant to my current reading of the Holocaust memoir ‘Take the Child and Disappear’  by Nina Basset.  The child in the photo on the front cover is alive today because one man, for reasons the author will never know, chose to negotiate dark matter in a way different to everyone else around him.  It’s a question that haunts us all.

Author: Janet Turner Hospital
Title: Orpheus Lost
Publisher: Fourth Estate, (Harper Collins), 2007
ISBN: 9780732284411 pbk., 358 pages
Source: Personal library