His attitude to women is similar; full of assumptions of empirical fact based on observed behaviour. Alas for Leo, his tidy world explodes when his wife Margaret announces she is leaving him for an accountant, and into this maelstrom of emotion he plunges in search of a self unseen since adolescence.

This odyssey into his own head leads him into a fantasy world; rich, marvellous, serious and absurd, a comic-strip Greek mythos of petulant child-gods and capricious, sensual goddesses, whose tiffs and reconciliations manifest themselves as storms and sun-baked calms.

Each tumult of the weather reflects Leo’s mental state as he struggles against his monolithic boss Ronald Masters (Ferrell has a sly, tongue-in-cheek touch with names) who is determined to control and impose order on unruly nature as part of a giant PR job. He must struggle, too, against a malevolent psychiatrist bent on committing him as a paranoid schizophrenic and against the impenetrable reserve of the opalescent Albina whom he meets at the Alternative Therapies Centre. Not least, he must struggle against the provocative aerial come-ons of the goddess Atmosphere, with whom he imagines himself in love.

Through each unexpected twist and turn of the plot, Leo is discovering ‘the power of metaphor’ in his own arid life, until the climax in the Outback whence he has unwillingly dragged the disintegrating three-ring circus of Project Arable at last. To reveal the ending-as­beginning would be to ruin the reading, but it is the soul of Leo Wetherill that blooms unseen. Whether it wastes its sweetness on the desert air is highly debatable, since that desert, barren only to closed minds, has a spartan beauty of its own.

Robyn Ferrell’s parable of modem Australian life combines elements of parody, farce, classical myth and a Hardyesque use of landscape as metaphor with instantly recognisable local colour’: the poolside party in suburban Sydney with discreetly blonded guests degenerating into shrieking sots, the Taxi Oracle in his ageing Holden prophesying to trapped fares, Clement Wragge the weatherman in his checked sportscoat adding his own home forecasts to the Channel Nine news. So convincing is the detail of this ‘real’ world that the landscape of Leo Wetherill’ s mind, nebulous as a cloud filled with desire, wonder and uncertainty, as readily invites recognition and sympathy.

Ferrell manages to make her point about the dangers of the European urge to order, neaten and subjugate Nature with a good-humoured subtlety evident in the way the plot strands, each serio-comic as life, are woven into Leo’s endearing self-revelations. She never falls into the self-conscious traps of post­modernism. If we read further sub­texts into Leo’s search, we are bringing ourselves into her book, which enhances an excellent yam and is one of the great pleasures of literature. Long may she continue philosophising in print-eat your heart out Hegel.