The primary narrator is Seamus O’Young, a contemporary Australian-born Chinese, or ABC, as he likes to call himself. He has Chinese features and blue eyes. Eventually, the narrative accounts for his mixed racial origins by tracing his connections back to one Lo Yun Shan, a Chinese prospector of the gold-rush days in Victoria, and Mary, a goldfields prostitute. Seamus gives us episodes from his unusually lonely life. He emerges as a curiously Dostoyevsky­ish figure, an outsider who is self­absorbed, distrustful of the imagination and literature at the same time as he is attracted to them. He is confused about the ethical life, incompetent and eccentric in relationships and driven by ill-defined impulses that are both self-illuminating and self-destructive. He is also voyeuristic and introverted; in short, he is deeply alienated not only from the dominant Australian cultural ethos but from the general life of his times. His disconnected narrative gives us episodes from his schooldays in a Catholic home, as well as his later life with his unlikely foster parents. Further experiences in a Sydney warehouse and as a teacher in Paris reveal an essential disharmony between a questing inner self and an askew outer world. Seamus hears voices from the past, promptings of his intuition and spirit that are to be understood as broadly Buddhist and Taoist in their preference for quietism and yearning for detachment. His Chineseness thus calls to him across a temporal and cultural gulf. He discovers the fragments of a journal kept by Shan, his historical doppelgänger of the 1850s, and begins to decipher them. Castro lays it on thick by having him develop yearnings for oriental food as well as Eastern metaphysics.

The other story, that of Lo Yun Shan of the journal, is interleaved with the Seamus narrative. This is an incisive account of the arduous voyage to Australia, life on the Ballarat and Bendigo goldfields, and the hostile attitude found there to the Chinese. As our Seamus moves towards an Eastern asceticism and other-worldliness, the historical Shan edges in the opposite direction, makes his cultural compromise with Mary, and eventually returns home. At the climax of the book, Seamus and Shan defeat the exigencies of chronology and meet each other in a moment of visionary intensity, a ‘dream that has not yet come about’, which fuses the past with the present.

Apart from its sometimes offputting straining after poetic depth, the main problem with this novel centres on Castro’s management of the Seamus narrative. Unlike the Shan section, this contemporary sequence is presented in a basically expressionistic mode. One can accept, I suppose, Seamus’s premature ageing and odd forms of solipsism as outward signs of his inner preoccupations and social alienation. But to have the alcoholic foster mother, Edna, so far gone on brandy in the early pages that she can’t look after Seamus or even cook rice, later become a highbrow bookworm, a globetrotter, and an exponent of racial memory – in  terms reminiscent of the more abstruse Coleridge – seems (as Alan Gould has already remarked) both opportunistic and unconvincing. So does Seamus’s meeting with Roland Barthes, and much in the later episodes. The prerogatives of fiction? Yes; but if Seamus’s search for cultural identity is to have force, he should, I think, be made to live in a denser and more humanly plausible environment from the one Castro provides, one that by contrast could more suitably define his instinctive resistance.

It is true that if Birds of Passage is cut loose into the realms of critical theory, it manages to raise some fashionable exegetical questions. In a sense, do Seamus and Shan write each other’s stories and ‘intend’ by their fictional existence Castro’s eventual third-person intervention at the centre of the text? Is the oddness of what happens to Shan, the apparently inconsequential nature of much that he experiences, a sly invitation to the reader to complete the novel by supplying his own symbolic code? The materials are there if that’s what you’re into. Yet Castro’s most effective writing occurs when his characters are made to confront directly the challenge to their cultural identity; some of the Seamus episodes, so oddly imagined, lack dramatic force and adequate clarity. Castro’s elaborate fictional manoeuvres seem in part to be a way of disguising the fact that at present he has trouble translating ideas into dramatic shape.

Kevin Brophy’s Getting Away With It concerns an unnamed narrator and his girlfriend, Mary. They travel from a remote country district in search of a new life in the city. The book follows their ‘quest and adventure’ in what seems to be an endless series of paragraph-length episodes. These are often no more than exchanges of what in this novel, described on its cover as a ‘witty enigma’, passes for dialogue. Others are brief scenes, intended perhaps to have poetic resonance. They never do. Whatever the intended age of these characters, they emerge as adolescents of arrested mental development; indeed, Brophy has preferred not to include any character of discernible intelligence in his book. The main duo reminisce mindlessly about their childhood, comment glumly on each other’s bodily smells and functions, and have a homing instinct for the sordid and drearv.

Nothing more happens to them, except that they meet other characters even duller, grubbier, and more scatological than themselves. They are pursued by a bureaucratic spy called Grundler, a Kafkaesque hand-me-down, arguably a figure in some cloudy allegory. No doubt Mary and her friend are meant to be seen as cultural victims eliciting from the reader that poignancy of which the blurb hopefully speaks. The book, however, lacks invention and originality. Its drab realism is, furthermore, riddled by those ‘easy devices of surrealism’ whose existence in the work is denied by Geoffrey Eggleston in his mannered Preface.