Michaela Kolofsky

So he's left his home in Japan.

He's left his father and his...

centuries-long sword-making family, the love of his life, Nara, they're all behind and he's been sent to bomb Darwin.

Instead of heading back with all the other Zeros to whatever their next part of their mission is, he veers off and heads out over the landscape of outer Darwin and into probably, I think, what's probably Litchfield National Park, what we call it now, but it wasn't called that then.

And he parachutes out of his plane, which then crashes into the side of a cliff, which is witnessed by Molly and Greta.

Yeah, Sam Greenaway's an Aboriginal guy from Mataranka and he looks like Tyrone Power, who was one of the silver screen heroes of 1942.

Yes, and the quest that we've been talking about has to do with this guy called Long Coat Bob, who is also an Aboriginal guy who is a real person but has disappeared in recent times and he's the source of the curse that Molly Hook and others believe is on their family.

He wears a Napoleonic era admiral's jacket that has an unknown provenance, but he wears this on his travels around the outback and so he's quite a figure.

And finding him is part of, you know, what is Molly's motivation.

She wants him to lift the curse that's on her as well as everybody else that she's related to.

So the structures and the traditions that Trent Dalton is relying on in the novel are quite obvious there.

He's not hiding anything.

Let's talk about the language for a moment.

Trent Dalton's style, his writing style, is very idiosyncratic.

In fact, I think it was notable in Boy Swallows Universe as well.

It's heavily ornamented prose with adjectives.

It's almost Baroque.

He uses these strings of adjectives.

They just sort of pile up on each other and they kind of create this sense of...

almost like they're vaulting out of Trent Dalton's brain.