Things feel a bit of end of days. Warnings keep coming about the tilt of politics everywhere to the authoritarian. Police are roaming the streets; anti-vaxxers are lacing their Instagram posts with promises of wholeness and truth; and everyone, from Lorde to the tech bros, appears to be trying to meditate or downward dog their way into some kind of relationship to climate catastrophe.
Into all this drops Miles Allinson’s In Moonland: anxious, elegiac, dreamlike.
The Melbourne writer’s second novel unfolds in four parts. First: Joe, new father to baby Sylvie, puzzling over the past and supposed suicide of his own father, Vincent. Then Vincent: on the hippy trail in India in 1976, drawn into the cult of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh. Next, Abbie: Vincent’s friend from the days of the ashram, witness to disintegration of father and now son. Finally: an adult Sylvie, battling the near future’s unpleasantly believable hostilities to visit her dad. But despite the intergenerational ties that bind the plot, it’s too easy to call this a family novel. It’s really about freedom, about characters searching for something to believe in before they jettison the rest. It reads like a requiem – for family, planet, hope for the future – bittersweet and played for laughs, last drinks after the funeral.
For a moment in the 70s, people believed new states of mind might build a new world. At the ashram in Pune, 25-year-old Vincent finds a world of “absolutely no noes”. In a state of “almost constant anxiety that something horrible would happen”, chasing freedom from both past and future, he is ripe for its “addictive promise of transcendence” (not to be confused with the more 21st century grift of self-fulfillment). But the practices encouraged by Rajneesh – later Osho, “the guru who really liked cars” and subject of 2018’s Wild Wild Country – spiral into violence. For Vincent, the consequences are real and terrible.
This novel cares less about what utopia might look like than the aftermath of our attempts at it. Vincent’s ageing friends recall collapsed projects, subtropical communes, defunct magazines and movements (Allinson’s counterculture research making itself felt) – bodies and dreams crumbling after the fact as surveillance capitalism bulldozes “the inconveniences associated with real human endeavour”. Track forward to Sylvie’s desertified future, after the “the riots, the blackouts, the housing crisis”, and everyone is (even more) shackled to the internet. The problem is, she realises, that without it “the night beyond seemed enormous and meaningless”.
Before the Melbourne writers’ festival was cancelled due to global plague, Allinson was scheduled to talk to Jamie Marina Lau about today’s “crisis of meaning”. From Briohny Doyle’s The Island Will Sink to Shaun Prescott’s The Town, a local sort of existentialism is unfolding in Australian fiction. Maybe it’s always been there. In Moonland’s affinity with Peter Carey’s The Tax Inspector goes beyond its orange robes and country gothic: they share a tang of menace and surreal dread, the muted gallows humour of characters on the fringe.
It all, like Joe, “reeks of despair”. Allinson’s characters are burned out and exhausted, and the difference between passivity and paralysis is troublingly unclear. They do not wish, or cannot bear, to confront what has happened to them or what they have done to others, even as they are haunted by it; they “reel away where the charge of reality bec[omes] too strong”.
As Joe tries half-heartedly and then with increasing obsession to find out just what happened in Pune, clues seem to hover just out of view. Reality itself becomes porous as Joe’s very real partner and child slip further and further away. Moths seep from the past and reappear, 10 pages and several decades later. There’s the tantalising idea a missing piece might give his life some meaning. Allinson experimented with this sense of peripheral mystery in Fever of Animals. His 2015 debut (with a narrator named Miles Allinson) won praise for its “postmodern” playfulness with reality. Here, Joe’s editorialising feels less intentional and more like blurry authorial intrusion – but it’s a small qualm in a book so alive and easy to read.
Allinson is unafraid of a beautiful line. Vincent emerges in a vivid sweep: a man who craves “the thrill of sudden fate bearing down on him”, who believes in happiness, if only “for a while”. Joe’s quixotic strain, on the other hand, is long dampened by his father’s unpredictability, love tempered by memories of apprehension, even fear. He and the increasingly estranged Sarah, Sylvie’s mother, are “two damaged planets teeming with incompatible life”. From sci-fi references to 70s astrology to literal (maybe) UFOs, outer space becomes a leitmotif for the limits of human capacity, the dangerous allure of emptiness and striking out alone, away from “the bombs we set off in each other”.
But no one is really a satellite. Friends gather round a televised boxing match, “united by an aura of nervousness and respect”. A woman considers the flicker of her unborn child. The lesson of this book about freedom might be that self-sufficiency doesn’t exist – that freedom is other people. Maybe it is actually a family novel.
In Moonland by Miles Allinson is the September book in the 2021 Melbourne City Reads initiative and is out now through Scribe.
