Stephen A. Russell The New Daily
Pic: AS Patric byTransit Lounge
Brutal and yet beautiful. Readings’ St Kilda bookseller A.S Patric’s haunting debut novel Black Rock White City scooped Australia’s premier literary prize, the Miles Franklin Award, at Friday’s opening of the Melbourne Writers Festival.
A haunting evocation of the lives left behind by new arrivals to Australia when civil war shatters their home country, Black Rock White City is a strange and unusual novel that grapples with the major moral dilemma of our time: the refugee crisis. It mesmerises with its emotional complexity and then leaves you bereft once the final page is turned.
Set in Melbourne’s Bayside suburbs, Jovan and Suzana’s marriage is collapsing, haunted by their sacrifices as Serbian refugees, including the loss of their young children in a war-torn tragedy that hangs heavy over all.
While their lives are a mess, she cleans house and he cleans the local hospital.
But strange things are afoot as the mysterious Dr Graffito leaves a macabre message scrawled on the hospital walls that Jovan, once a poet, must scour from existence.
Black Rock White City is much harder to remove from your mind. Rich with complicated characters, it’s a tale of heartfelt family drama, of class, of multiculturalism and also a dark and twisted thriller of sorts.
Patric’s poetic manipulation of language sings, deftly switching from a melancholic beauty found in all the small things, to horror and back again in a heartbeat. Christos Tsiolkas, author of Barracuda and The Slap, dubs it, “bold, mature and compassionate,” on the cover, and it’s well deserved praise …
