The armour-plated cause

There is every reason to admire this novel’s intent, but with the best will in the world I couldn’t recommend the result. Linda Jaivin’s current affairs comedy about the Villawood Detention Centre is so conscious of its pedagogic goals that it fails to offer a decent story. And it’s not funny. Believe me, I wanted to like it. Jaivin is a terrific writer with an enviable range, capable of the witty, surrealist smut of Eat Me (1995) and the kind of nuanced cross-cultural analysis that underpinned The Monkey and the Dragon (2001), her undervalued biography of Chinese rock’n’roll dissident Hou Dejian.

Initially, I liked her gambit, smuggling revelations about life behind the razor wire into a popular fiction format. God knows, the appalling mistreatment of refugees and other detainees has been detailed in features, documentaries, and news reports without changing a damn thing. Maybe it’s time it hit the book groups instead. But perhaps Jaivin, who has been visiting Villawood for years and who has already written two plays inspired by mandatory detention, is too close to the subject to treat her prose with the professional brutality that comedy requires.