Don't Look Down

Tom Gilling’s first novel, The Sooterkin, was an engaging and self-conscious oddity. Set in early nineteenth-century Tasmania, it had at its centre the striking conceit of the Sooterkin itself, a child born to a former convict and who is, to all intents and purposes, a seal. The Sooterkin was a critical success, inviting comparison to Peter Carey for its Dickensian energy and its playful engagement with the slippery rudiments of the Australian imagination.

Miles McGinty, Gilling’s second novel, might form the second part of the imaginary history of Australia for which Gilling laid the foundations in The Sooterkin. Like the latter, Miles McGinty is as much confection as novel, self-consciously lighter than air and almost totally reliant upon the charm of Gilling’s writing to hold itself aloft. Like The Sooterkin, it relies upon a powerful sort of indeterminacy to suspend its possibilities, although the indeterminacy lies in the novel’s resolution rather than its inception.