The story of The Tower Mill, about Tom and his mother, Susan, alternates between the pair over the course of thirty-something years as they try to come to terms with a police action, during the years of Joh Bjelke-Petersen, that left Tom’s biological father brain-dead. Unfortunately, Tom and Susan are painfully unlikeable characters – whiny, self-absorbed, self-important – and their tragedy, while important to them, never becomes so for the reader, leaving the eventual catharsis both underwhelming and undeserved. There is also an unsettling Oedipal thread woven throughout that seems entirely unacknowledged. (There are only so many comments a thirty-year-old man can make about his mother’s womb before it begins to seem deeply pathological.)

The novel’s prose is largely anonymous, leaving the plot to push on without unnecessary interruption, but there are moments when the prose and the story merge in such painfully overwrought ways as to bewilder the reader. The treatment of politics is a little better, and the exploration of the broad response to power and racism in Australia is definitely interesting, but even here there is a tendency towards polemic that lessens the impact.

The Tower Mill is a largely vacuous novel that mistakes sentimentality for genuine emotion and confuses self-absorption with narrative heft. There is a great story to be told about the Bjelke-Petersen era in Queensland, one that reaches into the personal to explain the political, but this isn’t it.