Johan Gabrielsen

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.

And one example is with Lou, who's the goddaughter.

And there's a couple of...

where you find out that not so long ago, her dad dropped dead at 49 of a stroke.

And then just a few weeks later, her mother disappeared, presumably in a national park, in a murder-suicide.

And that's it.

For the rest of the book, you're waiting...

actually for some sort of return to that, but you just have to accept that that's who Lou is, completely untraumatised by this recent experience.

Maybe it's because she's a lesbian and she's, you know, right on top of things and very clear-minded and knows who she is, but...

I just sort of thought, wow, okay, take me to what you were getting to there.

And there's a couple more things.

I don't even feel like in the end I understood what happened with the big reveal and inevitable calamity at the end of this novel.

Well, as you pointed out earlier, there's only so many waves in a day and they have to get diminishing returns on those the more people there are.

And there's also the sense of the wealth that's invading and the empty apartment buildings and mansions on the hill, the glass and sort of tiled mansions that no one's in.

They're not even people most of the time.

You know, 50 weeks of the year, I think they say, they're empty.