[In the following review of Oyster, Bliss finds fault in the novel's melodramatic plot and trite forebodings.]

Australian-born writer Janette Turner Hospital's sixth and latest novel [Oyster] is an old-fashioned page-turner which offers up an intriguing mystery but finally fails to deliver either the anticipated shocks or revelations. Set in the Queensland outback village of Outer Maroo, a settlement so deliberately off the map that “anyone who finds this place is lost,” the novel concerns the doomsday cult of a self-styled and shady messiah named Oyster and the effect of his communal opal-mining enterprise on the initially bemused but increasingly uneasy townspeople. In this place where people go to be nowhere—to be out of reach of loved ones, the law, and the government—Oyster and his wide-eyed groupies at first seem to belong as naturally as the perennial drought and the suffocating smell of death which accompanies it. But Oyster and his operations begin to pose a series of threats, especially as his community threatens to outnumber that of Outer Maroo. Finally, something must be done by someone. But by whom? Was the catastrophe precipitated by nervous economic interests within the opal-mining industry or its back-alley adjuncts? By disgruntled or terrified townspeople? By Oyster's rivals for spiritual authority among the leaders of what passes for orthodox religion in the town? Or was it perhaps Oyster himself, nudging the chosen few in the direction of the promised land? These questions, and their accompanying issues of culpability, are revisited with dangerous insistence by two newcomers—relatives of long-missing members of Oyster's cult—who arrive demanding answers. In confronting them, the town must of course confront its dark complicity in Oyster's designs.

Many of these themes will be familiar to readers of Hospital. The issue of moral responsibility has consumed her since her first, award-winning novel, The Ivory Swing. The combination of this concern with pronounced plotline and elements of the mystery-thriller genre will be remembered from Borderline, as will the preference for bestowing allegorical names on central female characters. In Borderline it was Felicity; in Oyster it is Mercy Given, who naturally survives the Jonestown (or is it Waco?) style holocaust at Oyster's camp. Finally, the theme of chronologically and geographically displaced people searching for where home might be and what it might demand of them recalls the stories of Dislocations, as well as much of Hospital's other work. Stylistic markers from Hospital's earlier texts are present as well. Examples are the use of the extended conceit and experimentation with point of view, which emerges here as an uneasy and unpredictable shifting between first and third persons.

Autobiographical echoes can also be heard. Of course, a woman who sees herself as a reluctant nomad and who divides her time among North America, Europe, and Australia would be preoccupied with issues of belonging and its costs. Of course, a woman who had been mugged at knife point would take note of ad hoc violence and the omnipresence of evil.

Finally, however, Oyster seems weakened by too much melodrama and too banal a message. As evidence of melodrama, let me cite the death of Susannah Rover, roving, noisy, and worst of all nosy schoolteacher imported from outside, who is kicked to death and thrown down a mine shaft where her corpse can be consumed by a feral pig, trapped there for the purpose. As evidence that the message is at least too broad and entirely unsurprising, let me quote the character who articulates it. Near the end of the novel, Sarah (mother of dead cult member Amy) reflects, “Extremism is everywhere. … There's no safe place.” Dutifully, the novel demonstrates extremism in faith and faithlessness, love and hate, selfishness and self-sacrifice, greed and generosity, weather, environment, and character.

Perhaps as millennial fervor heats up, a fervor sometimes not unlike Oyster's, we need to hear this sort of warning. I doubt, however, that Oyster is its most effective vehicle. Read the novel for its evocation of an unforgettable place and for its compelling story. Don't read it for its insights on human nature or religion run amok.