MixedSydney Morning Herald (AU)While Houellebecq has always been a great dramatist, Annihilation is weighed down by superfluous dream sequences ... Feels like a minor work: not quite angry enough, uncommitted to its grand political thriller plot, anticlimactic, and dismissive of its female characters for reasons that feel more pathological than subversive.
Alexis Wright
RaveSydney Morning Herald (AU)An aria to the First Nations way of life – a grand story of the world today, and an allegory for the end of days.
Chloe Hooper
PositiveThe Sydney Review of Books (AUS)Images of the bushfire as a creature that ‘licks’ the land open The Arsonist, and tempt the reader to position the fire as the book’s central character. If this were the case, however, there’d be no need to read more than seventy pages. Were we to accept a fire-as-protagonist thesis, the greatest point of tension would occur in the first act, causing the rest of the book to slump. But the central character of The Arsonist is Brendan Sokaluk, a shadowy shapeshifter, and the book an inquiry into why he set his hometown ablaze ... If not handled carefully, reconstruction narratives can turn stories into unsolvable puzzles. This is because they derive their narrative coherence from atomised sources that often conflict with each other. While Hooper does allow her multiple characters many digressions, The Arsonist achieves its clarity through strict linear chronology.
