A Wrong Turn at The Office of Unmade Lists - Softcover

Jane Rawson grew up in Canberra. During years as a travel editor and writer, mostly for Lonely Planet, she dawdled around the streets of San Francisco, Prague and Phnom Penh and left smitten. These days she lives in Melbourne's west. She likes cats, quiet, minimal capitalisation, and finding out that everything is going to be OK.

Rawson, a former Lonely Planet guidebook writer, now an editor at journalism website The Conversation, has concocted a playful fiction that breaks the rules of narrative and gets away with it. The action begins in Melbourne, but a Melbourne imagined in the aftermath of environmental calamity. It's a refugee city, manned by a UN peacekeeping mission, that has drawn people from across a globally warmed world. For the vast majority existence is a day-to-day struggle. Caddy, who has lost her husband following the explosion of their neighbouring oil facility, turns tricks and wheels and deals her way to subsistence, spending any excess on vodka and tonic. In her spare time she writes short stories, although not with the goal of getting an advance. Ray is her friend and pimp. A knockabout bloke of Aboriginal heritage with a nose for a deal, he does his best to help keep his mate Caddy afloat.Rawson's characters are warm and intriguing, the inventive logic of a dystopian Melbourne excellent. Her guidebook pedigree makes sense as we can detect the borrowing of places from Brazilian favelas to Asian internet cafes. But this is really just the beginning of the imaginative journey. In his deal-making Ray acquires a series of old maps whose folds have a portal effect. Meanwhile two kids are trying to fulfil their dead parents' mad ideal of visiting all of America, which they have divided into squares. In some ways, A Wrong Turn at the Office of Unmade Lists is reminiscent of early Paul Auster, most notably In the Country of Last Things. There's something too of the sheer storytelling joy that you find in Neil Gaiman, the meaning subsidiary to the narrative adventure. While early Peter Carey is an exception, we don't often see this kind of fiction in Australian literature. It's the strand of the novel affiliated with Cervantes' Don Quixote rather than the later work of the realists. Rawson has taken risks with plausibility and triumphed. --The Australian July 20 2013