Wonders of a Godless World by Andrew McGahan

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


This review first appeared in the now-defunct webzine, The Specusphere, in January 2010

Allen and Unwin, Sep 2009: ISBN 978-1-74175-809-2

Andrew McGahan is a mystery man. He does not appear to have a blog or a website — and he hasn't, so far as I can tell, written any other science fiction. Yet he's been around for fifteen years and has produced six novels and three plays. And he burst onto the SF scene with this very different book — immediately winning an Aurealis, even ousting Sean Williams, the undoubted King of Aurealisland.

Whatever else our mystery man may be, he is undoubtedly highly versatile. His first novel, Praise, won the Australian Vogel Literary Award. His third, Last Drinks, won a Ned Kelly Award for crime writing, and his fourth won multiple awards including the Miles Franklin and a Commonwealth Writers’ Prize. This dude is one seriously talented scribe.

Did he intend to write science fiction when he began work on Wonders of a Godless World? Or is he, like Margaret Atwood before him, somewhat bemused and embarrassed that he should win awards for genre writing? To win any award is a noteworthy event: to win awards for crime and science fiction as well as the highest literary ones must be very rare indeed. Not bad for a guy who left uni before finishing first year to work on the family farm.

Wonders of a Godless World is a good read. It does have certain literary features, such as having no named characters (not many genre writers would dare to try a trick like that, at least, not in a full-length novel) and we are never quite sure whether the events in the story are real or only happening in the mind of the protagonist. But it is certainly speculative, and it works.

The gist of the story is this: the orphan finds she can hear the foreigner speaking inside her head. The archangel, the duke, the witch and the virgin start behaving strangely and bizarre deaths occur. Although the archangel is not really an archangel; nor is the duke a duke, nor the witch a real witch. And as for the virgin – well, let's say she's not a virgin by the time the climax arrives (Yes, bad pun, I know…)

The blurb claims this to be a head-stretching story and one can only agree. It questions the nature of consciousness and even of what we call reality. Highly recommended, but don't expect it to be like any other work, speculative or otherwise, that you have ever read.

To learn more about Andrew McGahan, you have only to Google. There is an article worth reading on Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_M.... 




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