by Meg Mundell
Scribe Publications (2011)
Review published February 2012 at M/C Reviews
Meg's response on Facebook : Alison, I think I love you...thanks Ramon for pointing me to this ace review
.. the story is fragmented, like broken glass...
If fiction reveals our cultural journeys, speculative fiction confronts us with
dystopian visions of where we could be heading. Debut Australian novelist Meg
Mundell shines with her layering of Big Brotherly surveillance and alienated
citizenry over the culturally-rich first-world city of Melbourne.
Tally and Grace are sisters seduced by the mythology of the big city. After
years of being continuously covertly relocated across the Regions, the sisters
are plunged into homelessness when their father’s meth lab explodes. This first
explosion rips the sisters’ world apart. Physically apart at the time, they
escape separately to the city, each believing the other dead, but holding on to
the hope that has long sustained them.
Black glass is a barrier, a means for one group to spy on another. It is the
concealed surveillance cameras, the one-way glass at the casino and the health
club, the reflective glass of the tall inner-city buildings. It is a thematic
device used to effect in
Black Glass. The
story is fragmented, like broken glass, in its narrative viewpoint shifts, its
fragile relationships, and its subversive government-monitoring style headings.
Mundell’s rich use of fragmentation in scene, dialogue and form evokes
strong feelings of paranoia and emptiness. Characters are inter-related, but
must chart their courses alone. The sisters’ separate entries to the city are
documented, ironically as they are ‘undocs’; unverified and unregistered
citizens. They spend the majority of the story apart, but are determined to find
one another again. The odds, in this disturbing quest novel, are against them.
Decadent, dirty and dangerous, Melbourne emerges as a shady character in a
future-shocked world. It’s all ‘thick coils of heat’ and ‘filthy cracks’. Its
‘tea-brown’ (47) river is choked with plastic, its fountains dry. Streetkids
live in her tunnels, and everyone is drawn to the spectacle that is the
carnival.
Tally meets Blue, an indigenous undoc in the south interzone, and
he teaches her the streets. They get involved in a little illegal marketing
which ensures Tally gets around town to look for her sister.Grace doesn’t make it easy for her. She believes Tally dead and any thought
of her gets pushed deep down. In her blind quest to make it as an actress,
mirrored in today’s desperation for fifteen minutes of reality fame, Grace is
targeted by low-rent sex workers in record time and is surrounded by deviancy
her whole time in the city. She changes her name and her appearance and fools
herself well. While Tally is flashing her one digital image of Grace around,
Grace is becoming someone else.
Someone else being creative with the truth is Damon Spark, hack journalist,
purveyor of journotainment. He’s there, being subversive and morally indignant
in turn, at the climax; the undoc uprising that’s coming as the police cleanse
the streets to create an illusion for visiting dignitaries. Sadly Damon’s
protestations are more for his perceived integrity than for the fate of the
city’s underclass.
The most original character is Milk, a moodie. His migrant father had a
lawyer son and a dentist son, and... Milk who spends his waking hours
manipulating the mood of the room on a much higher level than a DJ at a
nightclub. He is a magician who can control and alter moods with colours,
lights, sounds, and edge-of-awareness scents. His work is observed by government
operatives who hire him under the pretence of spring-cleaning the city,
injecting harmony and goodwill. He is deceived by the perceived respect, he’s a
‘government consultant’ (215), and ignores the sinister intent in which ‘the
public just needs a nudge in the right direction’ (213).
‘There are those who make a positive contribution to the city, and those who
do the opposite. They’re just a drain on resources and they don’t portray the
place in the best light (213).’
Cue the destruction and fallout of character lines intertwining as undocs and
sympathisers protest at the security summit. As the city explodes with sirens
wailing, ‘bodies mown down like weeds’ (277) and ‘flames gobbling like a mass
of hungry tongues’ (273), the story’s denouement is subtle and fast and hardly a
solid conclusion, but it works.
