Cassie McCullough

But it ingrains this sense of racism.

insider-ness against the world, which is a losing battle.

It's just, you know, a nonsense and it's from an ancient past.

It was one of the themes that ran through it.

And at times I wondered if it needed to be interrogated a little bit more stridently with more strength.

Yeah, a lot of characters.

I couldn't keep track of all the characters, I'm sorry to say.

Well, we're told it's a social critique, almost through the characters' mouths.

I mean, it's a very chatty book.

It's very, each sentence, not each sentence, many sentences are filled with a kind of the rightly aside to an issue that hasn't actually been directly raised by the action or by the characters.

I mean...

It's very much openly a critique of this kind of Australia and its demise, whether that's a tragedy or quite happily so.

And maybe that's why it does sort of stay on the surface, I think, to use a surfing metaphor.

For me, the characters, none of the characters I really felt had stakes that were high enough for me to feel invested in them.

In fact...

I agree with Margaret Maguire.

A lot of them weren't very nice at all.

And the ones who were, they were fleeting, like Lou, the Oh My God daughter.

Yeah, I think it's primarily a social critique, but I'm happy to have my view adjusted.

I felt that often the punches failed to land and I wasn't even sure about exactly what had happened in circumstances.