Hope and despair

But I think there’s sometimes more emotion in a whisper. It doesn’t cause a fuss.’ So says Teller, the narrator of Bendigo writer Amanda Creely’s novel Nameless. Her story, Teller tells readers more than once, is not nice. She is right: set in an unnamed and unrecognisable country and in a world that seems not to have sophisticated technologies for war or peace, Nameless is the story of everyday citizens facing an invasion by a hostile, brutal, and powerful neighbouring army.

In the post-invasion world, everyone, not just Teller, has a new name to match their circumstances. As Teller puts it, ‘Now we were just the nameless lost to war.’ And so, Teller’s surviving daughter is named Daughter; her dead husband is Husband, her other daughter is Eldest, and her sons are Son and Youngest; the man who helps Teller and Daughter is Rescuer; and so on. Oddly, given that he is the wager of the war rather than a victim, the leader of the invading forces also earns a descriptive name: Teller calls him Invader.