Dark wonderings

Back in 2007, his academic cap firmly fastened, David Sornig wrote in the pages of Antipodes: ‘Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, the city [of Berlin] has, more than any other, become thought of as the place where, in Fukuyaman terms, history actually ended. In this sense it is the eschatological city par excellence.’ It is a curiosity of sorts that Australian writers have been in the front stalls documenting this apocalyptic vision.

Spiel locates itself self-consciously alongside A.L. McCann’s underrated Subtopia (2005) and Christos Tsiolkas’s acclaimed Dead Europe (2005). Sornig’s novel, frequently vivid and often perplexingly abstract, is its own dramatisation of eschatology. Like Subtopia, it is haunted by the ghosts of Berlin’s calamitous last century. Like Dead Europe, it features a suburban boy caught in the eternal loop of European savagery. Add to these titles Anna Funder’s Stasiland (2002) and Steven Conte’s The Zookeeper’s Wife (2007) and we have something approaching a micro-genre.