Transfiguring the world

Over the past two decades, novelists such as Alexis Wright, Kim Scott, and Ellen van Neerven have produced a body of work that not only unflinchingly explores the reality of Indigenous experience, but in many cases revisions the boundaries of the novel altogether, dissolving the strictures of conventional realism to give shape to Indigenous notions of temporality and relationship with Country.

Sharlene Allsopp’s hugely impressive début novel, The Great Undoing, extends this intellectual and imaginative project in powerful new ways. Set in the near future, it imagines a world transfigured by two innovations. The first, Bloodtalk, is technological. The by-product of a vaccine designed to combat a deadly flu pandemic, Bloodtalk uses genetic markers to identify and track anybody injected with the serum, creating a global system of monitoring and surveillance that allows governments to keep tabs on the movement of much of the world’s population. This has largely eliminated the need for border control – those who are not permitted to enter a country can immediately be identified and expelled. Similarly it has also made almost all transactions effectively invisible: one merely has to climb onto a bus, or walk into a shop or restaurant, and Bloodtalk identifies you and charges your accounts as necessary. But it has also created a world divided into those who live within the Bloodtalk network and the handful of countries and individuals who still exist outside it.