Johan Gabrielsen

They all know each other's business.

I mean, while they're not talking about their feelings, Johan, they're talking about everybody else's business like nobody knows.

Everyone knows everything that's going on.

But they're very resistant to outsiders and there's this real vein running through it about these outsiders that are coming to take Bluebird away and they're all going to be Asians or they're all going to be

You know, there's this stream of racism that runs right through the characters, many of them, not all of them, who are just like sort of, well, maybe it's accurate.

Maybe it's a really accurate reflection of that kind of coastal culture.

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.

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, they weren't.