Book reviews: In Darkness Visible by Tony Jones, True West by David Whish-Wilson, Peace by Garry Disher, Darkness for Light by Emma Viskic

Australia’s political past, both recent and more historic, is revisited in a new batch of Australian political crime thrillers.

Tony Jones and his book, In Darkness Visible.

Welcoming the publication in 2017 of Tony Jones’s debut novel, The Twentieth Man, reviewer Karen Chisholm remarked that the historical political thriller covering this country’s recent past has been a rarity in Australian fiction. It’s arguable this is still so. Several new crime fiction releases do offer recent political history content, however, while others factor in the national and international reach of organised crime.

The Twentieth Man focused on 1972-73 federal politics and ASIO operations in relation to right-wing Croatian nationalists carrying out terrorist missions and combat training in Australia. Blending fact with plausible re-creation and outright fiction, real persons with disguised and invented figures, Jones began with the bombing of two travel agencies in Sydney, shifted to guerilla warfare in Yugoslavia, and closed with an assassination attempt in Canberra.

Jones’s sequel, In Darkness Visible, jumps to impending trials in the International Criminal Court in The Hague in 2005-06. Dramatising the lead-up to this point, Jones then traverses a range of times and locations: 1991-92, 1970-73 and the 1940s, in Australia, Croatia, Bosnia and Slovenia.

Tony Jones is one of the ABC’s most experienced current affairs journalists, who for the past twelve years has provided a rare opportunity for everyday Aussies to have their voices heard through Q&A. His new book ‘In Darkness Visible’ is available now. pic.twitter.com/csjBO2O099

— The Project (@theprojecttv) November 15, 2019

Much of his historical material is engrossingly interesting and worthy of elaboration and remembrance. However, the book’s structure and capaciousness come with the concomitant risks of repetition and reader confusion. He also risks laying himself ­vulnerable to charges of partisanship and distortion.

The long-term bond between protagonists Marin Katich and Anna Rosen, established in book one, persists. Australian-reared Marin is of Christian-affiliated Croatian heritage, his father a past leader of the Nazi-aligned, anti-Communist Ustasha, his mother Muslim. Anna is of Jewish descent, her father a leading Australian communist. Readers must bear with this conspicuously contrived aspect of the novel, just as they did with the ­hybrid identities and mythological parallels in Janette Turner Hospital’s post-September 11 novel, Orpheus Lost.

Years after being declared dead in an ambush, Marin has reappeared: in custody charged with war crimes, he’s playing chess with Slobodan Milosevic. Marin indisputably carried out killings and participated in momentous military campaigns, most notably the defence of Vukovar. Do the scales tip towards monstrosity or nobility? Such questions touch on all warfare and its motivators. Becoming a researcher for Marin’s legal defence team, Anna puts herself in moral and physical jeopardy. Can she find exculpatory evidence?

Author David Whish-Wilson and his book True West

David Whish-Wilson’s True West is quality fiction made from materials that in other hands would remain pulp sensationalism. It depicts a reactionary white nationalist movement in Perth in 1988 as experienced by a youth shanghaied into its ranks after fleeing a survivalist gang culture. For readers unfamiliar with the recent political history inspiring his storyline, Whish-Wilson ­appends a note about the Australian Nationalist Movement, represented as the Australian Patriotic Movement in his novel, and its neo-Nazi hate crimes, which included firebombing businesses owned by Asian-Australians.

Whish-Wilson’s use of a 17-year-old protagonist, named Lee in an apparent nod to the drifter brother in Sam Shepard’s 1980 play, True West, means the book may appeal to both adult and YA readers. Lee has grown up in regional Western Australia, at times in desert camps, under his father’s survivalist, anarchist ­tutelage. His father’s cohort began in the 1970s when hardened Vietnam veterans formed a brotherhood of errant knights on motorbikes. As the group increasingly funded its operations by robbery and selling drugs and guns (“It was part of his father’s ethos to avoid banks unless you were robbing them.”), it grew fearsome enough to hold sway over police and elected officials.

Precociously resourceful, and improbably well-read thanks to books left behind by his mother, who vanished from his life early on, Lee hopes to support himself as an unregistered tow-truck operator after he almost kills a man and flees to the city. But soon he’s tricked into making his bed with predatory men even worse than those he’s trying to evade.

The APM values Lee because he’s “a cleanskin as far as ASIO is concerned”. A coercive leader informs Lee that his father is not dead, as he’d believed, but in prison and under witness protection. If Lee wants to see his father, he must rob banks to boost the APM fighting fund. Readers who sympathise with Lee will be inclined to excuse his law-breaking and smack habit and hope that he can salvage his relationship with upmarket schoolgirl Emma.

In its victim-outlaw on the run storyline, its social awareness and its between-the-lines ideological commentary, this is a tale with antecedents as far back as William Godwin’s Things as They Are, or The Adventures of Caleb Williams. In its characters’ aversion to immigration, True West links to the tradition of Australian invasion fear polemics. There are also mid-century science fiction and dystopian speculative influences, and Old Testament echoes. The fact of Lee’s indigenous ancestry, hinted at in the opening pages, is a nice irony considering his co-option by the APM, which abhors “racial dilution”.

Whish-Wilson’s characters’ insights into the psychological drivers of the men in both violent movements are fascinating. To quote just one: “Most of the fellas that come to the movement are lookin for the brothers and fathers they never had, and the rest of em are lookin for a regular opportunity to fight.”

Garry Disher’s 2013 novel Bitter Wash Road was a popular, word-of-mouth success. Regrettably it wasn’t also a major prize winner in Australia. I doubt I’m alone in thinking it’s one of ­Australia’s best-written crime fictions to date, a standout for the clarity and restraint of its prose and its authentic evocation of a small community in a testing environment.

Garry Disher and his book, Peace

Peace, the sequel, is written in a similarly poised tone, with understatement, laconic dialogue, dry wit, and awareness of ­socioeconomic trends such as buyouts of unsustainable family properties by Chinese-owned agri-companies.

Protagonist Constable Paul Hirschhausen was demoted and sent to Siberia (this mid-north farming district of South Australia) a year ago. Previously he was an Adelaide CIB detective, an honest one, but became collateral damage when squad corruption was exposed. He’s still sensing hostility from mistrustful colleagues, an injustice he usually copes with by smiling.

Indeed, Hirsch is a model of tact, with merit points for improvisation and self-reliance. For a youngish man he has the old-fashioned decency and musical tastes of an older man, a not uncommon disconnect in genre fiction by mature authors. His intermittent reading of a pastoral woman’s journal from the mid-19th century is also a stretch, but it does direct attention to settler-colonial attitudes and doings, the most disturbing a local massacre of “Blacks” after a shepherd was speared.

With Christmas imminent, Hirsch is hoping for his definition of peace; “a general absence of mayhem”. At this point we’re 150-odd pages into the novel, with Disher testing readers’ patience by delaying his major action so long. Thus far, the worst things Hirsch has dealt with have been a vicious case of horse killing and mutilation and an incident in which an agitated woman grabbed his service pistol, with a bystander’s video of the incident subsequently going viral. If anyone is annoying him it’s the ­pettily authoritarian busybody Martin, a perceptively drawn ­secondary character.

Predictably, the holiday denies Hirsch peace. Despatched to an isolated house on a welfare check, he discovers two dead bodies, the agitated woman and her son, and deduces two young girls are missing. Soon Hirsch is also realising he’s an under-informed player in a scenario involving international organised crime, ­witness protection and untrustworthy Sydney police.

Emma Viskic’s novels featuring private investigator Caleb Zelic have been most memorable for the likeable and touchingly fallible character of her protagonist. In book three, Darkness for Light, Caleb is back in Melbourne, handy to his pregnant wife, Aboriginal artist Kat, and again stumbling into controversial zones.

Emma Viskic.

Viskic continues to blend her dark content with whimsy and humour. The opening chapters of the new novel illustrate the technique. Having decided to concentrate on safe white-collar fraud investigations, Caleb isn’t fazed by an invitation to an inner-urban children’s farm for a clandestine meeting. He discovers his suited prospective client murdered. Police arrive, one with an unhelpful goatee “like a half-eaten rabbit”.

With the deceased revealed to be an undercover federal police officer, Caleb is involuntarily linked to organised criminality under scrutiny by a federal taskforce. And when another federal cop violently assaults him and threatens him with prosecution, he feels pressured to do what she demands: locate his absent business partner, the double-crossing Frankie, who’s said to be in possession of wanted documents. Caleb is hampered and endangered, however, by the feds’ need-to-know approach. Knowledge isn’t just power but also protection, he muses.

Caleb’s secondary case takes him into a restaurant that smells “like deep-fried happiness” and is run by a multi-generation ­family using sign language, with customers also Auslan users. As Caleb mostly uses lip reading plus hearing aids, he is not a representative member of this capital-D Deaf community, but his access into it enables Viskic to observe the politics of cultural identity. Readers may be prompted to find out more about the emergence of a proud community of people who value their deafness as a cultural marker rather than a disability or pathology, are resentful of paternalism, and expect protection of their rights.

Readers new to this series may find the staccato quality of ­Viskic’s prose jarring. Words are omitted. Sentences resemble truncated thoughts. Exchanges are direct, even seemingly blunt and abrupt. Visuals and body language supplement words. I suspect this prose style serves several purposes: it hurries the action along, when read aloud it has its own percussive musicality, and it complements the customary communications style of some in the deaf community.

Robyn Walton is a writer and critic.

In Darkness Visible

By Tony Jones

Allen & Unwin, 480pp, $32.99

True West

By David Whish-Wilson

Fremantle Press, 264pp, $29.99

Peace

By Garry Disher

Text, 336pp, $29.99

Darkness for Light

By Emma Viskic

Echo Publishing, 304pp, $29.99