Small-sized reviews, raves, and recommendations.

Australia is weird. Beyond the well-known mammalian oddities, the marsupials and monotremes, the biological strangeness also extends to fishes. Australia is home to one species of lungfish. (These lobe-finned fishes are also extent in Africa and South America.) The lungfish is also a creature of significance in Aboriginal creation mythos. Lungfish, by Louis Armand, is an encyclopedic tour de force/farce. Within its pages, it covers the creation and dissolution of Mudbeast, a rock band. It also traces the murky history of Australia’s participation in the Cold War’s space, nuclear, defense, and intelligence agencies, becoming another tendril with the United States and the United Kingdom. There is a recounting of the Betty Fleming poisoning investigation and trial. In addition, there is a history of the fight for Aboriginal rights and reparations. All of these various threads are woven together through a mishmash of styles and genres. Cold War shenanigans are recounted through lengthy quotations; the Betty Fleming case through hard-boiled detective narratives, clinical reports, and Minties adverts (the alleged method of delivery); the fight for Aboriginal rights told through a stage play; and sudden insertions of comic panels. The various styles, fonts, genres, and imagery create a kaleidoscopic phantasmagoria. It is both visually jarring yet sublimely dream-like. A literary equivalent of a filmic montage sequence, one is lulled into its disjointed rhythm. Outrageous and outrage-inducing, it brims with righteous anger and dark humor. It captures Australia in all its criminal malfeasance – domestic poisonings along with genocidal and ecocidal government policies – and its strange beauty. Lungfish is a weird and wonderful novel, like its fishy namesake, a bizarre hybrid thing, swimming in water and breathing air.