Familiar anguish

Omar Musa’s first novel, Here Come the Dogs (2014), is a rousing dramatisation of the combustible sense of displacement and dissatisfaction simmering at the underrepresented margins of Australian life. Its protagonists are singular and compelling: each is tender and violent, hopeful and despairing, pitiful and triumphant. They all possess a uniquely hybrid identity, and each is searching for something that is always out of reach.

Fierceland, Musa’s second novel, shares some of his first book’s qualities and strategies. It fuses poetry and prose, slips ambiguously between realism and fantasy, and pulls multiple voices and points of view into a cacophonous whole. Memories, hallucinations, and dreams shade into one another. In both novels, it is hard to tell if a character’s perceptions are distorted by mental illness or drugs, or if bizarre things are really happening to them. In Fierceland, ghosts and assorted mythical creatures and fantastical places may exist in the world of the novel or in the minds of its characters, or some combination of both.