Accessibility Tools

  • Content scaling 100%
  • Font size 100%
  • Line height 100%
  • Letter spacing 100%
Fiction

‘Did the bird talk dirty?’

A peripatetic novel
by Andrew McLeod
November 2021, no. 437

Travelling Companions by Antoni Jach

Transit Lounge, $32.99 pb, 408 pp

ABR receives a commission on items purchased through this link. All ABR reviews are fully independent.

Great art provokes by taking great risks. It goads, teases. When we recognise we’re in the hands of a master, the banal becomes profound, the sacred profane, and the grandest of truths reveal themselves in the most innocent of questions. Take Pauly Shore’s scathing 1994 cinematic rebuke of the complicity of heteronormativity in the military industrial complex, In the Army Now. In it, two gay soldiers signal their intent to defy the US Army’s ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ policy and serve their country in a neo-colonial war by asking, simply, ‘Is it hot in Chad?’

 


Continue reading for only $10 per month.
Subscribe and gain full access to Australian Book Review.

Already a subscriber? .
If you need assistance, feel free to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..



Travelling Companions by Antoni Jach

Transit Lounge, $32.99 pb, 408 pp

ABR receives a commission on items purchased through this link. All ABR reviews are fully independent.


From the New Issue

Fierceland: A haunted second novel by Omar Musa

by Shannon Burns

On the Calculation of Volume: Book I by Solvej Balle, translated from Danish by Barbara J. Haveland & On the Calculation of Volume: Book II by Solvej Balle, translated from Danish by Barbara J. Haveland

by Anthony Macris

Letters – October 2025

by Eli McLean, Theodore Ell, Ben Brooker, et al.

You May Also Like

Teacher’s Work: A useful look inside schools by R. W. Connell

by Paul Clancy

Justice and Hope: Notes from a life of the mind by Raimond Gaita

by Frank Bongiorno

Leave a comment

If you are an ABR subscriber, you will need to sign in to post a comment.

If you have forgotten your sign in details, or if you receive an error message when trying to submit your comment, please email your comment (and the name of the article to which it relates) to ABR Comments. We will review your comment and, subject to approval, we will post it under your name.

Please note that all comments must be approved by ABR and comply with our Terms & Conditions.

Submit comment