April 16, 2025 • 26 mins
The opening scene of Chris Flynn’s fourth and latest novel, Orpheus Nine, came to him in a dream. Not long after, he had the whole story down from start to finish. This week, Chris and Michael sit down for a conversation about the falsity of certitude, how trauma can re-shape a community, and what The Exorcist, the Bible, and Winnie the Pooh all have in common.
Reading list:
A Tiger in Eden, Chris Flynn, 2012
The Glass Kingdom, Chris Flynn, 2014
Mammoth, Chris Flynn, 2020
Here Be Leviathans, Chris Flynn, 2022
Orpheus Nine, Chris Flynn, 2025
The Cracked Mirror, Christopher Brookmyer, 2024
You can find these books and all the others we mentioned at your favourite independent book store.
Socials: Stay in touch with Read This on Instagram
Guest: Chris Flynn
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
So because I simply can't get enough of sharing books
I'm excited by with other readers. One of my side
hustles is a monthly page in the Quantas in Flight
magazine recommending books. Even if I'm not jumping on a
plane quite as often as I'd like, there's something deeply
satisfying about being able to steer the reading selections of
weary travelers. I like to imagine people getting off their planes,
(00:23):
dusting crumbs off their lap, and popping into that airport
bookstore off the back of my recommendation. Anyway, last month
I wrote one such review for a book called Orpheus nine.
It's the latest novel from Irish born Melbourne based writer
Chris Flynn, and it was an enthusiastic recommendation. But something
(00:43):
strange happened. The editor of the Quantus mag came back
to me and she gently asked if I might swap
it out for a different book. We worry the content
is too graphic, was the message, And while I was stumped,
I was not surprised because the driving PREMI behind this
novel is a particularly bleak kind of horrifying. One day,
(01:05):
while watching their primary school aged children playing a game,
of football. The people of the small Australian town of
Gatten see all the nine year olds on the field
suddenly die a gruesome death after simultaneously chanting some lines
from King Lear in Latin. Something supernatural or other worldly
is afoot, and it's a global phenomenon across the world.
(01:26):
One hundred and thirty million children die on that first day,
and in the weeks and months afterwards, any child who
turns nine likewise dies horribly. It's maybe not that surprising
in hindsight. The quandas had doubts about whether that was
the kind of vibe airborne commuters were craving. But the
ensuing book is surprising. It's a page turner, and it's
(01:49):
even blackly funny. Amongst its achievements, Flynn sets the whole
thing in small town Australia, following three former schoolmates. Now
adults are affected by the phenomenon in different ways. While
it's a global, even other worldly set of stakes, it's
understood through the lens of a single community. For anyone
(02:11):
who's read Flynn before, the sense of humor and agile
play won't come as a surprise, but the ambition and
the utterly fearless, play with the monstrous. Find him in
New Territory. This is an Australian Stephen King novel, horror
and social commentary and more than anything, deeply gripping.
Speaker 2 (02:30):
So fasten your child's seatbelt.
Speaker 1 (02:32):
Before your own, stole your trade table and snacks, and
get ready for a bumpy flight. I'm Michael Williams and.
Speaker 2 (02:43):
This is read.
Speaker 1 (02:44):
This a show about the books we love and the
stories behind them. My own question to you seems self evident. You,
Chris Flynn, no one, No one hurt me.
Speaker 2 (03:06):
Were you bullied as a nine year old?
Speaker 3 (03:07):
I was relentlessly bullied as a child because I was skinny,
milinky long legs, as my mum used to call me.
She said, I've seen better legs hanging out of a
bird's nest.
Speaker 2 (03:17):
That's right.
Speaker 3 (03:18):
That's a hard one to come back from. And my
dad was a former bodybuilder, so I was the weakling
who's constantly abused for not being able to lift huge
fence posts that he could lift.
Speaker 4 (03:28):
With one hand.
Speaker 3 (03:30):
But I have nothing against kids personally.
Speaker 4 (03:33):
I grew up in.
Speaker 3 (03:34):
A foster family in that my mom and dad were
foster parents when I was in my early teens and
my sister was four years younger than me, and so
throughout my teenage years we had kids in the house,
over one hundred little.
Speaker 4 (03:48):
Kids, all young.
Speaker 3 (03:49):
They're all seized by the social services for various reasons,
sometimes for a few weeks, sometimes months, and a couple
of cases we had them for years. So I had
all these little brothers and sisters, and my sister and
I were pseudo parents. In fact, we'd often walk around
the housing estate in Belfast pushing the buggy and people
would assume we were the mum and dad because there's
so many teenage pregnancies of these kids, and we were horrified.
(04:11):
Or we would sometimes say no, no, we're brother and sister, which.
Speaker 4 (04:13):
Would freak people like them.
Speaker 1 (04:14):
That's very reassuring, that's what you want to hear about
those teen parents.
Speaker 4 (04:18):
That's right, we're brother and sister. On top of that.
Speaker 3 (04:21):
So I sort of grew up being a parent to
absolutely loads of little brothers and sisters. But I mean,
the beautiful thing about fostering is that you're giving them
stability and then the kids move on. They either would
go back to their natural parents, who sometimes would have
dependency issues and were sorting them some things ourselves out
so they'd get the kids back, or they'd move on
(04:44):
to an adoptive family. And the thing was you were
never allowed to see them ever again, or have any
contact with them whatsoever. If you saw them in the
shopping center.
Speaker 4 (04:53):
You were told. My mom and dad were told walk
the other way.
Speaker 3 (04:56):
And partly it's for the good of the kids, because
they don't want to introduce confusion into their lives, like
who are you? Why do you know me? You know,
you assume that they'll just forget you. But there's a
sadness to that too, and I had never really processed it.
Speaker 4 (05:10):
I don't think very well. And I think part of.
Speaker 3 (05:12):
The reason behind this book was that for some reason
it just came up. My sister and I never had
kids of our own, and we always wonder, is it
because some sort of paternal instinct or maternal instinct was
satisfied in us, something some switch was flipped and we
never felt compelled.
Speaker 1 (05:29):
To or you associated it with an impermanence as well,
like that, you know that you invest in it, it's
an important thing in your life, but it's not something
that you then hold on to. It's not an ongoing thing.
Speaker 3 (05:41):
Could be yeah, yeah, and we obviously obviously all those
kids are now in their forties. I don't know what
happened to them. Some of them will be alive, some
not probably, but they don't know me, Yeah, they don't.
They probably don't remember that I was a figure in
their lives. But I wonder if maybe one of the
reasons behind this book subconscient was me trying to sort
(06:02):
of because all those kids, they might as well be
dead to me, you know, and this this book my
way of sort of copying with that.
Speaker 4 (06:10):
I don't know.
Speaker 1 (06:12):
If it's a coping mechanism, it's a deeply unhealthy one,
and I suggest you get some therapy.
Speaker 2 (06:17):
That's all I say.
Speaker 1 (06:19):
I mean, the reason I start there is that when
the advanced reading copy of this book arrived, the publisher
basically sold it in the advanced reading copy as Chris
Flynn was standing at a kid's football game and basically
had a vision.
Speaker 3 (06:35):
Yes, So what happened to me was I drove myself
seven thousand kilometers around Australia, staying in murder motels, visiting
over one hundred book shops. And I wanted to do
it because it was twenty twenty two and I hadn't
got to do that with Mammoth, which is twenty twenty,
because everything was locked down and it was an adventure.
But when I got back, the last thing I wanted
to think about was books are writing. I got home thought, okay,
(06:58):
I do want to be bothered with this, and I
had to dream like a few days later, in which
that opening scene of the book is exactly what happened.
Speaker 4 (07:05):
In my dream.
Speaker 3 (07:06):
I was standing there alongside these parents. I live in
a small regional town, and I was there on the
footy ground watching it all happen. And when I got
up the next morning, I wrote it down, and it's
the opening scene in the book almost forbade him as
like as it happened in my dream. And then over
the next hour, the rest of it all just appeared.
(07:26):
And so the whole book was there, right to the ending,
right from the beginning, and I thought, oh, bloody hell,
now I'm going to have to write the freaking thing,
you know.
Speaker 4 (07:34):
And it was the start of the summer.
Speaker 3 (07:36):
I was intending to take some time off, and I
ended up just giving up my summer to sit on
my computer every day and watches this thing appeared before
my eyes.
Speaker 4 (07:45):
So who knows where that came from.
Speaker 1 (07:48):
You do something that I particularly love, and I think
it's what makes the book work as well as it does,
which is you take this kind of speculative, fantastical premise
has global ramifications, but then you write about it in
an intensely local way rather than canvas and here's how
it's rolling out in Paris and Tokyo and New York
(08:11):
and whatever. You bring it right in and you go
very small and very intimate, kind of essentially with three
protagonists who are all relating to this global tragedy in
their own different ways. And a town called Gatton, which
is kind of seven and a half thousand people small
population was the town? I mean, are you just writing
(08:32):
about where you live? And it's thinly veiled and every
nasty person in the book is one of your neighbors.
Speaker 4 (08:37):
A little bit.
Speaker 3 (08:39):
I have to be careful so I don't get hung
drawn and quartered. I tend to not reveal the time
that I live in so that.
Speaker 1 (08:46):
I nearly said it that be nice, Michael Brandon.
Speaker 3 (08:50):
But obviously if I'm speaking to anyone local, no, no, no,
it's clearly somewhere else, some horrible place in Queensland. That's
got nothing to do with where I live, but the
general framework of the time is is very similar.
Speaker 4 (09:00):
To where I live.
Speaker 3 (09:01):
Yeah, the local thing I think is important for this
kind of story. I'm not a big fan of those
sort of apocalypse books where it's like we've got to
get on the cargo plane and fly to Paris next
and to talk to a scientist and then he sends
us to you know, Cape Town, like boring, Like how
on earth can a person relate to that? And it
(09:24):
just seemed a very relatable story from the beginning, a
very intimate story from the beginning. And although the premise
it's a premise heavy book, but the premises, as you say,
has gotten out of the way at the beginning, and
then it's very focused on a local level on how
people respond to your disaster because it all happened to us,
all right, you know, there was a global disaster and
we all had to deal with it in our own,
(09:46):
very localized way because we were actually trapped in our
own homes to that sort of degree, in your neighbors,
the street you were in, you became very intimate with that.
So it made sense to approach it in those terms.
Speaker 1 (09:56):
Thinking in particular as Melbourne based person who went through
the COVID lockdowns here, in many ways it has the
beats of a pandemic novel that actually, if you take
away the more fantastical elements and you take away some
of the more kind of overt body horror stuff, what
you have at the heart is a society that's assumptions
(10:17):
about itself and how it operates irretrievably fractured and trying
to find some version of normalcy after that. And in particular,
the relationship with Salt is very reminiscent of many of
the responses to COVID and the anti vaxx crowd and
that kind of thing. Were you aware of it as
a kind of COVID allegory or is that just something
(10:39):
that's easy to impose on it afterwards?
Speaker 3 (10:41):
It was imposed a little bit as I went along.
I'm not so interested in COVID as I am in
hope people's opinions. Everyone's got an opinion about everything. Now
we're expected to be experts on all matters, matters of science,
matters of medicine, everything. And I don't know if that's
a bit of an allele from COVID, where suddenly we
(11:02):
all become very opinionated and experts, but of course none
of us are experts in anything, and so I think
that's what fascinated me more about the COVID thing was
how all of a sudden, everyone's a scientist. All of
a sudden, everyone's choosing to believe certain things they read
on the Internet whilst ignoring other things because it suits
their personal narrative, or it's there a coping mechanism, And
(11:23):
that became the focus of the book was how you
can have neighbors, friends who know each other, who are
suddenly because of something that happens, all sent in various
different directions, all believe certain things, and all believe they're correct,
whereas they're probably all partially correct but also partially wrong,
(11:43):
but not wanting to listen to what the other person's
point of view might be.
Speaker 1 (11:46):
Part of how that rolls out, then, in the context
of Alpheus nine, is that the overlay of those neighborly
disagreements in the face of something bigger than themselves is
all the history and baggage and stories that are not
bigger than themselves, the ways in which they have come
up together in this town. They have had romances and
let each other down and secrets and betrayals and all
(12:08):
that kind of stuff. How do you get the stakes
right in a book like this where you know you're
open with a cataclysmic thing. How do you find the
space for character staff for comedy, even when you're killing
off kids on page three?
Speaker 3 (12:27):
Yeah? Yeah, Well, the killing of kids thing will probably
put people off, but you sort of get past that,
and it probably will be a bit of an issue
for some people. They'll be put off by the idea
of it. And I certainly have parents of nin yeurals
particularly who've said to me, I'm not reading this, whereas
other parents of non YURLs said I'm definitely reading this
because my kid does my head in. But yeah, how
(12:48):
do you sort of get away from that? Is it's
unavoidable that I have to bring up the premise at
the beginning and set it up once people are past
those initial pages. I think they'll find something very different
on folding, because I don't dwell on that in fact,
it's not really mentioned at all after the initial incident.
Speaker 4 (13:05):
But yeah, how do you develop those characters?
Speaker 3 (13:07):
The characters were standing next to me on the sidelines,
and it's sort of you get this creepy feeling in
the back of your neck as an author whenever this happens,
because you're like, that seems like quite a complete person.
There Where did they come from?
Speaker 1 (13:19):
That?
Speaker 3 (13:19):
An aspect of my personality is that sort of an
amalgamation of people I know? Who is this this woman
standing next to me that suddenly I know everything about,
including her life as a teenager. It's hard to pin
down where that comes from, but I guess that's kind
of the juice for me, is being presented with these
characters wherever they're coming from, and exploring them and not
(13:42):
really knowing whether anyone will care, but hoping that they do.
But also I love the idea of the premise sends
people's lives in a very specific direction. But no one
is all bad and no one is all good in
this world. And too often in fiction things written in
those black and white terms, those binary terms, and that
(14:04):
doesn't please me. And so I saw an opportunity here
is like these characters, you will like them at certain
points in the book, and other times you will not
like them, and then maybe you'll like them again because
you will understand why they've made the choices that they've made,
and so it is basically a character study of these
three characters in the book. And that's probably going to
(14:24):
also disappoint some people because they'll think it's a sort
of womb bamb slam pandemic book about there's been a disaster,
you know, when's the SWAT team coming in to sort
all this out?
Speaker 1 (14:37):
When we returned, Crisis finds why a sense of mystery
is so important to this book, and he shares the
Holy Trinity of books he grew up will be right
back amongst the many mysteries in Orpheus nine. The reciting
(15:05):
of the passage from King Lear gives it an element
of the supernatural or the other worldly that takes it
from Oh, this could be a viral contagion, This could
be whatever to something truly freaky.
Speaker 2 (15:18):
Did you.
Speaker 1 (15:20):
Did you have ideas about what that freakinness was?
Speaker 3 (15:24):
So right from the beginning, I knew exactly what this
was and I know how this happened, but I have
not revealed that in the book, and some may find
that frustrating, but really, early on, I'm not going to
reveal why this is happening, although I know why it's happening,
partly because you can only really disappoint by having a
resolution of people say oh it's aliens. Okay, oh that's
(15:48):
that's a disappointment. You're only going to disappoint people. So
I chose to avoid the reveal. But you're right, there's
also that mysterious supernatural thing with the kids. Before they
swell up full of salt, they recite a passage from
King Lear in Latin, which introduces that creepiness to it
where you're like, there's no way they could know that,
why is that happening? So it gives that tension to
(16:09):
the narrative right from the beginning, where you're reminded periodically, Okay,
so we're dealing with people in a small town her
living with the aftermath of a disaster. They've got their
own problems to solve, but also there's this other thing
looming over them the whole time that no one's ever
really resolving either. And I think that just it gives
(16:31):
you a through line of the books that you don't
forget and you don't get bogged down in domestic politics.
You have that constant reminder, that sort of eeriness that
casts a shadow over the whole book.
Speaker 4 (16:45):
And so that was all done on purpose.
Speaker 1 (16:47):
And I think it's very effective because it means that
the dual impulses of the book pull in different directions.
It's a very grounded, very realistic book. If you let
yourself forget what's laid the carters to where they are.
Everything else about it is society in disarray, small town
worrying about kind of who's in charge. You know, they're
(17:09):
getting topperware from big w you know, yeah, very domestic,
very kind of grounded. Do you read a lot of
speculative fiction? Do you read a lot of that kind
of more fantastical stuff.
Speaker 4 (17:19):
I sure do.
Speaker 3 (17:20):
In fact, I always did as a young reader, and
I moved away from it a little bit and got
into more literary world, you know, in my twenties and thirties,
But I've gone back to it, and I find a
lot more satisfaction in sort of speculative and sci fi light,
fantasy light. I love that sort of black mirror Twilight Zone.
(17:43):
I've seen so many episodes of the Twilight Zone growing up,
and I think that probably influenced me more than I
care to acknowledge, that idea that this is a very
recognizable world in this story. But there's something off, and
we can't quite put a finger on what it is,
but we.
Speaker 4 (18:00):
All know there's something off, and you know, you could
argue that that is our reality.
Speaker 3 (18:05):
You know, we all live in a world where we
think we have certitude, but we don't really. We don't
really know what's around the corner. As we all learned
a harsh lesson with COVID. We never saw it coming
and suddenly it affected us dramatically, and none of us
really know what lies around the corner or where things.
We live in an age of uncertainty, but we desperately
yearn for certainty. So I think there's a really interesting tension.
Speaker 1 (18:28):
There having an answer to what's happening in Orpheus nine
and withholding that answer from your readers, does that mean
it's conceivable there's a scenario where this is a world,
or a context or a premise that you would return to,
Because it does seem to me that pick a different town,
pick a major city, pick a different context in which
(18:50):
they're responding to the same thing, and there's endless stories
that may come out of that.
Speaker 3 (18:56):
What you're talking about is what I call the flu
the flint literary universe. You know, good magic where the
TV show comes out, and then there's an offshoot show
set in another country from a different point of view.
Speaker 1 (19:10):
Yeah, I've got the branded drinking mug, but otherwise I
haven't followed all the rest of it.
Speaker 3 (19:15):
So because I know what happens, I have had a
completely bonker's, totally left field idea for a continuation of
the story that would drive people up the wall. But
I'll be tempted if this book does well. I mean,
I've got a lot of few other things in the pipeline,
but if this book does well, then I would consider
(19:35):
tackling that. It wouldn't be easy to do, and there'd
be a bit of a leap of faith people would
have to take with me, and people would probably be like,
what the hell what's happening now?
Speaker 1 (19:47):
I can see in your eyes though not only is
that not off putting to you, but I suspect that's
what gets you up out of bed and writing in
the morning is not easy.
Speaker 2 (19:58):
Confounding readers and.
Speaker 1 (19:59):
Make them come and meet you halfway, and a sense
of play, it is they the.
Speaker 2 (20:04):
Things that get you going.
Speaker 3 (20:05):
It totally is, and I've started to get into a
bit of a flow state now whenever I'm writing, and
then it appears. I'm like, okay, so I'm obviously onto something.
I'm not going to question this too much. My favorite
part of the whole writing process. I love it all,
even the promotion stuff, which a lot of people hate.
Speaker 4 (20:20):
I love that.
Speaker 3 (20:22):
I guess I'm a former stage actor when I was young,
and I'm a bit of a natural showman maybe, But
I really love the moments when the thing is being
created and I am laughing at myself, thinking what's wrong
with me? Where is this coming from? Because it's a
mystery to me. Every time it comes to writing a book,
I feel like I'm starting from scratch, and because the
(20:44):
ideas are often unusual and the execution of them is
very different each time. But that's the joy in it
for me.
Speaker 1 (20:54):
You know, apart from your own childhood and that kind
of presence of lots of kids in your life. Such
an important thread through this book is about parental grief,
parental sense of responsibility, that kind of bond. Did you
workshop this with friends with kids? Did you like pick
up the scab of How would you respond to this?
(21:16):
How would you deal with it? Or is it entirely
inactive imaginative empathy.
Speaker 4 (21:20):
No, I did not.
Speaker 3 (21:22):
I don't let anyone read my work at all whilst
I'm working on it. I sort of have a horror
of that workshopping of things, maybe incorrectly, maybe I should,
but I'm not from an academic background, so i just
have no history of that in me. So I've always
sort of been a loner, solitary writer who just does.
Speaker 4 (21:43):
His own thing.
Speaker 3 (21:44):
And for years I was writing books in my twenties
and thirties that sometimes I would send it to publishers
and you get pretty form rejections. To give you credit,
you're one of the first people to ever throw me
a bone in the literary world, because my first book,
Tiger Needen, which came out in twenty twelve. You read
a really early draft of that, which very different to
(22:06):
the finished book, and then you met up with me
for a coffee and you didn't really know me, and
gave me some very pointed, kind but also firm advice
about what worked and what didn't work. And I was
very grateful for that. And then when I you know,
over the following months, I just thought about it, and
I think one of the things you said to me
was about the voice, because you had heard me speak,
(22:28):
and you said, I just don't see you in this,
and it made me think, oh, is it okay to
put me into it, not as a character, but as
to channel a voice that comes from my head. And
I ended up going away months later writing that book
in the voice of a character who was a very
similar to the guys I grew up with, but not me,
(22:49):
and laughing whilst.
Speaker 4 (22:50):
I was doing it.
Speaker 3 (22:51):
Playing but for an autodidact, you know, someone who doesn't have,
you know, a formal education, really, and there was no
books in our house growing up. We only had three
book in our house going up, because my parents are
functionally illiterate, you know. The three books were and it
sort of says a lot of the Illustrated Bible. The
house would Pooh Corner by AA Milton and William Peter
(23:12):
Blood is The Exorcist excellent.
Speaker 1 (23:14):
So those are the first three bits of three that's
the Holy Trinity.
Speaker 3 (23:17):
But it probably explains a lot of my work.
Speaker 1 (23:19):
The main characters in all three were a top but
no pants at some point.
Speaker 2 (23:25):
Probably it's a little lonely, but there you go, there
you go, you go.
Speaker 3 (23:29):
But for someone from that background, I sort of dope
working class Irish kid. You know, it meant a lot
to me that you did that, because it set me
on a path that I had never considered before. And
isn't that the beauty about being in the arts and
taking a risk sometimes and you know, having a feeling
and sometimes it's those things that make all the difference.
Speaker 1 (23:50):
Well, it's yeah, it's the most satisfying part of working
book adjacent and look abvious nine is magnificent. It deserves
to do terribly well, and I hope it does. I
hope people don't get scared away by the concept and
they get lured in for your chicanery and trickery which
(24:11):
is there on every page. But it's been great to
chat to you today.
Speaker 3 (24:14):
Thanks for coming in lovely to see you, Michael.
Speaker 1 (24:22):
Orpheus nine by Chris Flynn is available at all Good bookstores.
Before we go Two small Things One. Reading Orpheus nine
(24:43):
reminded me of one of my favorite television programs of
recent years. It's The Leftovers, which is based on a
novel by Tom Parrotta.
Speaker 2 (24:50):
The novel is good.
Speaker 1 (24:51):
Parota is the guy who wrote Election, amongst other things,
but the TV series is transcendent. It's about the rapture happening,
and a sizeable percentage of the world's population one day
disappearing without a trace. It has the same elements of
mystery to it, but also kind of existential questions about
who we are and what we believe. It's a great
show and I recommend pushing through this somewhat.
Speaker 2 (25:12):
Bleak first series. And as for what I've.
Speaker 1 (25:14):
Been reading this week, I wanted to mention a crime
novel by Scottish writer Christopher Brookmeyer. It's called The Cracked
Mirror and it has alternating chapters. One from the perspective
of a Miss Marple style character, written very much in
the style of Agatha Christie, and then the alternating chapter
is a hard boiled la detective written in the style
of Michael Connolly. The two different modes of crime shouldn't
(25:36):
work together, but the two intertwine as the characters meet
each other and the ensuing book is weird, surprising, and
a great one for lovers of crime fiction.
Speaker 2 (25:45):
You can find it and all the other books.
Speaker 1 (25:47):
We've mentioned today at your favorite independent bookstore.
Speaker 2 (25:54):
That's it for this week's show.
Speaker 1 (25:55):
If you enjoyed it, please tell your friends and rate
and review us. This week, I read This, I'm joined
by James Bradley to discuss his latest novel, Landfall.
Speaker 5 (26:05):
My initial idea was that I wanted to find a
way of writing something which put kind of climate migration
at the center. Like I'd already written several books with
kind of climate in them, but I wanted one that
was more explicitly engaged with kind of questions of justice
and questions of dislocation and refugees and those kinds of issues.
Speaker 1 (26:29):
Read this is a Schwarz Media production made possible thanks
to the generous support of the AAR Group. The show
is produced and edited by Clara Ames, with mixing and
original compositions by Zolten Fletcher. Thanks for listening, See you
next week. Thro
So because I simply can't get enough of sharing books
I'm excited by with other readers. One of my side
hustles is a monthly page in the Quantas in Flight
magazine recommending books. Even if I'm not jumping on a
plane quite as often as I'd like, there's something deeply
satisfying about being able to steer the reading selections of
weary travelers. I like to imagine people getting off their planes,
(00:23):
dusting crumbs off their lap, and popping into that airport
bookstore off the back of my recommendation. Anyway, last month
I wrote one such review for a book called Orpheus nine.
It's the latest novel from Irish born Melbourne based writer
Chris Flynn, and it was an enthusiastic recommendation. But something
(00:43):
strange happened. The editor of the Quantus mag came back
to me and she gently asked if I might swap
it out for a different book. We worry the content
is too graphic, was the message, And while I was stumped,
I was not surprised because the driving PREMI behind this
novel is a particularly bleak kind of horrifying. One day,
(01:05):
while watching their primary school aged children playing a game,
of football. The people of the small Australian town of
Gatten see all the nine year olds on the field
suddenly die a gruesome death after simultaneously chanting some lines
from King Lear in Latin. Something supernatural or other worldly
is afoot, and it's a global phenomenon across the world.
(01:26):
One hundred and thirty million children die on that first day,
and in the weeks and months afterwards, any child who
turns nine likewise dies horribly. It's maybe not that surprising
in hindsight. The quandas had doubts about whether that was
the kind of vibe airborne commuters were craving. But the
ensuing book is surprising. It's a page turner, and it's
(01:49):
even blackly funny. Amongst its achievements, Flynn sets the whole
thing in small town Australia, following three former schoolmates. Now
adults are affected by the phenomenon in different ways. While
it's a global, even other worldly set of stakes, it's
understood through the lens of a single community. For anyone
(02:11):
who's read Flynn before, the sense of humor and agile
play won't come as a surprise, but the ambition and
the utterly fearless, play with the monstrous. Find him in
New Territory. This is an Australian Stephen King novel, horror
and social commentary and more than anything, deeply gripping.
Speaker 2 (02:30):
So fasten your child's seatbelt.
Speaker 1 (02:32):
Before your own, stole your trade table and snacks, and
get ready for a bumpy flight. I'm Michael Williams and.
Speaker 2 (02:43):
This is read.
Speaker 1 (02:44):
This a show about the books we love and the
stories behind them. My own question to you seems self evident. You,
Chris Flynn, no one, No one hurt me.
Speaker 2 (03:06):
Were you bullied as a nine year old?
Speaker 3 (03:07):
I was relentlessly bullied as a child because I was skinny,
milinky long legs, as my mum used to call me.
She said, I've seen better legs hanging out of a
bird's nest.
Speaker 2 (03:17):
That's right.
Speaker 3 (03:18):
That's a hard one to come back from. And my
dad was a former bodybuilder, so I was the weakling
who's constantly abused for not being able to lift huge
fence posts that he could lift.
Speaker 4 (03:28):
With one hand.
Speaker 3 (03:30):
But I have nothing against kids personally.
Speaker 4 (03:33):
I grew up in.
Speaker 3 (03:34):
A foster family in that my mom and dad were
foster parents when I was in my early teens and
my sister was four years younger than me, and so
throughout my teenage years we had kids in the house,
over one hundred little.
Speaker 4 (03:48):
Kids, all young.
Speaker 3 (03:49):
They're all seized by the social services for various reasons,
sometimes for a few weeks, sometimes months, and a couple
of cases we had them for years. So I had
all these little brothers and sisters, and my sister and
I were pseudo parents. In fact, we'd often walk around
the housing estate in Belfast pushing the buggy and people
would assume we were the mum and dad because there's
so many teenage pregnancies of these kids, and we were horrified.
(04:11):
Or we would sometimes say no, no, we're brother and sister, which.
Speaker 4 (04:13):
Would freak people like them.
Speaker 1 (04:14):
That's very reassuring, that's what you want to hear about
those teen parents.
Speaker 4 (04:18):
That's right, we're brother and sister. On top of that.
Speaker 3 (04:21):
So I sort of grew up being a parent to
absolutely loads of little brothers and sisters. But I mean,
the beautiful thing about fostering is that you're giving them
stability and then the kids move on. They either would
go back to their natural parents, who sometimes would have
dependency issues and were sorting them some things ourselves out
so they'd get the kids back, or they'd move on
(04:44):
to an adoptive family. And the thing was you were
never allowed to see them ever again, or have any
contact with them whatsoever. If you saw them in the
shopping center.
Speaker 4 (04:53):
You were told. My mom and dad were told walk
the other way.
Speaker 3 (04:56):
And partly it's for the good of the kids, because
they don't want to introduce confusion into their lives, like
who are you? Why do you know me? You know,
you assume that they'll just forget you. But there's a
sadness to that too, and I had never really processed it.
Speaker 4 (05:10):
I don't think very well. And I think part of.
Speaker 3 (05:12):
The reason behind this book was that for some reason
it just came up. My sister and I never had
kids of our own, and we always wonder, is it
because some sort of paternal instinct or maternal instinct was
satisfied in us, something some switch was flipped and we
never felt compelled.
Speaker 1 (05:29):
To or you associated it with an impermanence as well,
like that, you know that you invest in it, it's
an important thing in your life, but it's not something
that you then hold on to. It's not an ongoing thing.
Speaker 3 (05:41):
Could be yeah, yeah, and we obviously obviously all those
kids are now in their forties. I don't know what
happened to them. Some of them will be alive, some
not probably, but they don't know me, Yeah, they don't.
They probably don't remember that I was a figure in
their lives. But I wonder if maybe one of the
reasons behind this book subconscient was me trying to sort
(06:02):
of because all those kids, they might as well be
dead to me, you know, and this this book my
way of sort of copying with that.
Speaker 4 (06:10):
I don't know.
Speaker 1 (06:12):
If it's a coping mechanism, it's a deeply unhealthy one,
and I suggest you get some therapy.
Speaker 2 (06:17):
That's all I say.
Speaker 1 (06:19):
I mean, the reason I start there is that when
the advanced reading copy of this book arrived, the publisher
basically sold it in the advanced reading copy as Chris
Flynn was standing at a kid's football game and basically
had a vision.
Speaker 3 (06:35):
Yes, So what happened to me was I drove myself
seven thousand kilometers around Australia, staying in murder motels, visiting
over one hundred book shops. And I wanted to do
it because it was twenty twenty two and I hadn't
got to do that with Mammoth, which is twenty twenty,
because everything was locked down and it was an adventure.
But when I got back, the last thing I wanted
to think about was books are writing. I got home thought, okay,
(06:58):
I do want to be bothered with this, and I
had to dream like a few days later, in which
that opening scene of the book is exactly what happened.
Speaker 4 (07:05):
In my dream.
Speaker 3 (07:06):
I was standing there alongside these parents. I live in
a small regional town, and I was there on the
footy ground watching it all happen. And when I got
up the next morning, I wrote it down, and it's
the opening scene in the book almost forbade him as
like as it happened in my dream. And then over
the next hour, the rest of it all just appeared.
(07:26):
And so the whole book was there, right to the ending,
right from the beginning, and I thought, oh, bloody hell,
now I'm going to have to write the freaking thing,
you know.
Speaker 4 (07:34):
And it was the start of the summer.
Speaker 3 (07:36):
I was intending to take some time off, and I
ended up just giving up my summer to sit on
my computer every day and watches this thing appeared before
my eyes.
Speaker 4 (07:45):
So who knows where that came from.
Speaker 1 (07:48):
You do something that I particularly love, and I think
it's what makes the book work as well as it does,
which is you take this kind of speculative, fantastical premise
has global ramifications, but then you write about it in
an intensely local way rather than canvas and here's how
it's rolling out in Paris and Tokyo and New York
(08:11):
and whatever. You bring it right in and you go
very small and very intimate, kind of essentially with three
protagonists who are all relating to this global tragedy in
their own different ways. And a town called Gatton, which
is kind of seven and a half thousand people small
population was the town? I mean, are you just writing
(08:32):
about where you live? And it's thinly veiled and every
nasty person in the book is one of your neighbors.
Speaker 4 (08:37):
A little bit.
Speaker 3 (08:39):
I have to be careful so I don't get hung
drawn and quartered. I tend to not reveal the time
that I live in so that.
Speaker 1 (08:46):
I nearly said it that be nice, Michael Brandon.
Speaker 3 (08:50):
But obviously if I'm speaking to anyone local, no, no, no,
it's clearly somewhere else, some horrible place in Queensland. That's
got nothing to do with where I live, but the
general framework of the time is is very similar.
Speaker 4 (09:00):
To where I live.
Speaker 3 (09:01):
Yeah, the local thing I think is important for this
kind of story. I'm not a big fan of those
sort of apocalypse books where it's like we've got to
get on the cargo plane and fly to Paris next
and to talk to a scientist and then he sends
us to you know, Cape Town, like boring, Like how
on earth can a person relate to that? And it
(09:24):
just seemed a very relatable story from the beginning, a
very intimate story from the beginning. And although the premise
it's a premise heavy book, but the premises, as you say,
has gotten out of the way at the beginning, and
then it's very focused on a local level on how
people respond to your disaster because it all happened to us,
all right, you know, there was a global disaster and
we all had to deal with it in our own,
(09:46):
very localized way because we were actually trapped in our
own homes to that sort of degree, in your neighbors,
the street you were in, you became very intimate with that.
So it made sense to approach it in those terms.
Speaker 1 (09:56):
Thinking in particular as Melbourne based person who went through
the COVID lockdowns here, in many ways it has the
beats of a pandemic novel that actually, if you take
away the more fantastical elements and you take away some
of the more kind of overt body horror stuff, what
you have at the heart is a society that's assumptions
(10:17):
about itself and how it operates irretrievably fractured and trying
to find some version of normalcy after that. And in particular,
the relationship with Salt is very reminiscent of many of
the responses to COVID and the anti vaxx crowd and
that kind of thing. Were you aware of it as
a kind of COVID allegory or is that just something
(10:39):
that's easy to impose on it afterwards?
Speaker 3 (10:41):
It was imposed a little bit as I went along.
I'm not so interested in COVID as I am in
hope people's opinions. Everyone's got an opinion about everything. Now
we're expected to be experts on all matters, matters of science,
matters of medicine, everything. And I don't know if that's
a bit of an allele from COVID, where suddenly we
(11:02):
all become very opinionated and experts, but of course none
of us are experts in anything, and so I think
that's what fascinated me more about the COVID thing was
how all of a sudden, everyone's a scientist. All of
a sudden, everyone's choosing to believe certain things they read
on the Internet whilst ignoring other things because it suits
their personal narrative, or it's there a coping mechanism, And
(11:23):
that became the focus of the book was how you
can have neighbors, friends who know each other, who are
suddenly because of something that happens, all sent in various
different directions, all believe certain things, and all believe they're correct,
whereas they're probably all partially correct but also partially wrong,
(11:43):
but not wanting to listen to what the other person's
point of view might be.
Speaker 1 (11:46):
Part of how that rolls out, then, in the context
of Alpheus nine, is that the overlay of those neighborly
disagreements in the face of something bigger than themselves is
all the history and baggage and stories that are not
bigger than themselves, the ways in which they have come
up together in this town. They have had romances and
let each other down and secrets and betrayals and all
(12:08):
that kind of stuff. How do you get the stakes
right in a book like this where you know you're
open with a cataclysmic thing. How do you find the
space for character staff for comedy, even when you're killing
off kids on page three?
Speaker 3 (12:27):
Yeah? Yeah, Well, the killing of kids thing will probably
put people off, but you sort of get past that,
and it probably will be a bit of an issue
for some people. They'll be put off by the idea
of it. And I certainly have parents of nin yeurals
particularly who've said to me, I'm not reading this, whereas
other parents of non YURLs said I'm definitely reading this
because my kid does my head in. But yeah, how
(12:48):
do you sort of get away from that? Is it's
unavoidable that I have to bring up the premise at
the beginning and set it up once people are past
those initial pages. I think they'll find something very different
on folding, because I don't dwell on that in fact,
it's not really mentioned at all after the initial incident.
Speaker 4 (13:05):
But yeah, how do you develop those characters?
Speaker 3 (13:07):
The characters were standing next to me on the sidelines,
and it's sort of you get this creepy feeling in
the back of your neck as an author whenever this happens,
because you're like, that seems like quite a complete person.
There Where did they come from?
Speaker 1 (13:19):
That?
Speaker 3 (13:19):
An aspect of my personality is that sort of an
amalgamation of people I know? Who is this this woman
standing next to me that suddenly I know everything about,
including her life as a teenager. It's hard to pin
down where that comes from, but I guess that's kind
of the juice for me, is being presented with these
characters wherever they're coming from, and exploring them and not
(13:42):
really knowing whether anyone will care, but hoping that they do.
But also I love the idea of the premise sends
people's lives in a very specific direction. But no one
is all bad and no one is all good in
this world. And too often in fiction things written in
those black and white terms, those binary terms, and that
(14:04):
doesn't please me. And so I saw an opportunity here
is like these characters, you will like them at certain
points in the book, and other times you will not
like them, and then maybe you'll like them again because
you will understand why they've made the choices that they've made,
and so it is basically a character study of these
three characters in the book. And that's probably going to
(14:24):
also disappoint some people because they'll think it's a sort
of womb bamb slam pandemic book about there's been a disaster,
you know, when's the SWAT team coming in to sort
all this out?
Speaker 1 (14:37):
When we returned, Crisis finds why a sense of mystery
is so important to this book, and he shares the
Holy Trinity of books he grew up will be right
back amongst the many mysteries in Orpheus nine. The reciting
(15:05):
of the passage from King Lear gives it an element
of the supernatural or the other worldly that takes it
from Oh, this could be a viral contagion, This could
be whatever to something truly freaky.
Speaker 2 (15:18):
Did you.
Speaker 1 (15:20):
Did you have ideas about what that freakinness was?
Speaker 3 (15:24):
So right from the beginning, I knew exactly what this
was and I know how this happened, but I have
not revealed that in the book, and some may find
that frustrating, but really, early on, I'm not going to
reveal why this is happening, although I know why it's happening,
partly because you can only really disappoint by having a
resolution of people say oh it's aliens. Okay, oh that's
(15:48):
that's a disappointment. You're only going to disappoint people. So
I chose to avoid the reveal. But you're right, there's
also that mysterious supernatural thing with the kids. Before they
swell up full of salt, they recite a passage from
King Lear in Latin, which introduces that creepiness to it
where you're like, there's no way they could know that,
why is that happening? So it gives that tension to
(16:09):
the narrative right from the beginning, where you're reminded periodically, Okay,
so we're dealing with people in a small town her
living with the aftermath of a disaster. They've got their
own problems to solve, but also there's this other thing
looming over them the whole time that no one's ever
really resolving either. And I think that just it gives
(16:31):
you a through line of the books that you don't
forget and you don't get bogged down in domestic politics.
You have that constant reminder, that sort of eeriness that
casts a shadow over the whole book.
Speaker 4 (16:45):
And so that was all done on purpose.
Speaker 1 (16:47):
And I think it's very effective because it means that
the dual impulses of the book pull in different directions.
It's a very grounded, very realistic book. If you let
yourself forget what's laid the carters to where they are.
Everything else about it is society in disarray, small town
worrying about kind of who's in charge. You know, they're
(17:09):
getting topperware from big w you know, yeah, very domestic,
very kind of grounded. Do you read a lot of
speculative fiction? Do you read a lot of that kind
of more fantastical stuff.
Speaker 4 (17:19):
I sure do.
Speaker 3 (17:20):
In fact, I always did as a young reader, and
I moved away from it a little bit and got
into more literary world, you know, in my twenties and thirties,
But I've gone back to it, and I find a
lot more satisfaction in sort of speculative and sci fi light,
fantasy light. I love that sort of black mirror Twilight Zone.
(17:43):
I've seen so many episodes of the Twilight Zone growing up,
and I think that probably influenced me more than I
care to acknowledge, that idea that this is a very
recognizable world in this story. But there's something off, and
we can't quite put a finger on what it is,
but we.
Speaker 4 (18:00):
All know there's something off, and you know, you could
argue that that is our reality.
Speaker 3 (18:05):
You know, we all live in a world where we
think we have certitude, but we don't really. We don't
really know what's around the corner. As we all learned
a harsh lesson with COVID. We never saw it coming
and suddenly it affected us dramatically, and none of us
really know what lies around the corner or where things.
We live in an age of uncertainty, but we desperately
yearn for certainty. So I think there's a really interesting tension.
Speaker 1 (18:28):
There having an answer to what's happening in Orpheus nine
and withholding that answer from your readers, does that mean
it's conceivable there's a scenario where this is a world,
or a context or a premise that you would return to,
Because it does seem to me that pick a different town,
pick a major city, pick a different context in which
(18:50):
they're responding to the same thing, and there's endless stories
that may come out of that.
Speaker 3 (18:56):
What you're talking about is what I call the flu
the flint literary universe. You know, good magic where the
TV show comes out, and then there's an offshoot show
set in another country from a different point of view.
Speaker 1 (19:10):
Yeah, I've got the branded drinking mug, but otherwise I
haven't followed all the rest of it.
Speaker 3 (19:15):
So because I know what happens, I have had a
completely bonker's, totally left field idea for a continuation of
the story that would drive people up the wall. But
I'll be tempted if this book does well. I mean,
I've got a lot of few other things in the pipeline,
but if this book does well, then I would consider
(19:35):
tackling that. It wouldn't be easy to do, and there'd
be a bit of a leap of faith people would
have to take with me, and people would probably be like,
what the hell what's happening now?
Speaker 1 (19:47):
I can see in your eyes though not only is
that not off putting to you, but I suspect that's
what gets you up out of bed and writing in
the morning is not easy.
Speaker 2 (19:58):
Confounding readers and.
Speaker 1 (19:59):
Make them come and meet you halfway, and a sense
of play, it is they the.
Speaker 2 (20:04):
Things that get you going.
Speaker 3 (20:05):
It totally is, and I've started to get into a
bit of a flow state now whenever I'm writing, and
then it appears. I'm like, okay, so I'm obviously onto something.
I'm not going to question this too much. My favorite
part of the whole writing process. I love it all,
even the promotion stuff, which a lot of people hate.
Speaker 4 (20:20):
I love that.
Speaker 3 (20:22):
I guess I'm a former stage actor when I was young,
and I'm a bit of a natural showman maybe, But
I really love the moments when the thing is being
created and I am laughing at myself, thinking what's wrong
with me? Where is this coming from? Because it's a
mystery to me. Every time it comes to writing a book,
I feel like I'm starting from scratch, and because the
(20:44):
ideas are often unusual and the execution of them is
very different each time. But that's the joy in it
for me.
Speaker 1 (20:54):
You know, apart from your own childhood and that kind
of presence of lots of kids in your life. Such
an important thread through this book is about parental grief,
parental sense of responsibility, that kind of bond. Did you
workshop this with friends with kids? Did you like pick
up the scab of How would you respond to this?
(21:16):
How would you deal with it? Or is it entirely
inactive imaginative empathy.
Speaker 4 (21:20):
No, I did not.
Speaker 3 (21:22):
I don't let anyone read my work at all whilst
I'm working on it. I sort of have a horror
of that workshopping of things, maybe incorrectly, maybe I should,
but I'm not from an academic background, so i just
have no history of that in me. So I've always
sort of been a loner, solitary writer who just does.
Speaker 4 (21:43):
His own thing.
Speaker 3 (21:44):
And for years I was writing books in my twenties
and thirties that sometimes I would send it to publishers
and you get pretty form rejections. To give you credit,
you're one of the first people to ever throw me
a bone in the literary world, because my first book,
Tiger Needen, which came out in twenty twelve. You read
a really early draft of that, which very different to
(22:06):
the finished book, and then you met up with me
for a coffee and you didn't really know me, and
gave me some very pointed, kind but also firm advice
about what worked and what didn't work. And I was
very grateful for that. And then when I you know,
over the following months, I just thought about it, and
I think one of the things you said to me
was about the voice, because you had heard me speak,
(22:28):
and you said, I just don't see you in this,
and it made me think, oh, is it okay to
put me into it, not as a character, but as
to channel a voice that comes from my head. And
I ended up going away months later writing that book
in the voice of a character who was a very
similar to the guys I grew up with, but not me,
(22:49):
and laughing whilst.
Speaker 4 (22:50):
I was doing it.
Speaker 3 (22:51):
Playing but for an autodidact, you know, someone who doesn't have,
you know, a formal education, really, and there was no
books in our house growing up. We only had three
book in our house going up, because my parents are
functionally illiterate, you know. The three books were and it
sort of says a lot of the Illustrated Bible. The
house would Pooh Corner by AA Milton and William Peter
(23:12):
Blood is The Exorcist excellent.
Speaker 1 (23:14):
So those are the first three bits of three that's
the Holy Trinity.
Speaker 3 (23:17):
But it probably explains a lot of my work.
Speaker 1 (23:19):
The main characters in all three were a top but
no pants at some point.
Speaker 2 (23:25):
Probably it's a little lonely, but there you go, there
you go, you go.
Speaker 3 (23:29):
But for someone from that background, I sort of dope
working class Irish kid. You know, it meant a lot
to me that you did that, because it set me
on a path that I had never considered before. And
isn't that the beauty about being in the arts and
taking a risk sometimes and you know, having a feeling
and sometimes it's those things that make all the difference.
Speaker 1 (23:50):
Well, it's yeah, it's the most satisfying part of working
book adjacent and look abvious nine is magnificent. It deserves
to do terribly well, and I hope it does. I
hope people don't get scared away by the concept and
they get lured in for your chicanery and trickery which
(24:11):
is there on every page. But it's been great to
chat to you today.
Speaker 3 (24:14):
Thanks for coming in lovely to see you, Michael.
Speaker 1 (24:22):
Orpheus nine by Chris Flynn is available at all Good bookstores.
Before we go Two small Things One. Reading Orpheus nine
(24:43):
reminded me of one of my favorite television programs of
recent years. It's The Leftovers, which is based on a
novel by Tom Parrotta.
Speaker 2 (24:50):
The novel is good.
Speaker 1 (24:51):
Parota is the guy who wrote Election, amongst other things,
but the TV series is transcendent. It's about the rapture happening,
and a sizeable percentage of the world's population one day
disappearing without a trace. It has the same elements of
mystery to it, but also kind of existential questions about
who we are and what we believe. It's a great
show and I recommend pushing through this somewhat.
Speaker 2 (25:12):
Bleak first series. And as for what I've.
Speaker 1 (25:14):
Been reading this week, I wanted to mention a crime
novel by Scottish writer Christopher Brookmeyer. It's called The Cracked
Mirror and it has alternating chapters. One from the perspective
of a Miss Marple style character, written very much in
the style of Agatha Christie, and then the alternating chapter
is a hard boiled la detective written in the style
of Michael Connolly. The two different modes of crime shouldn't
(25:36):
work together, but the two intertwine as the characters meet
each other and the ensuing book is weird, surprising, and
a great one for lovers of crime fiction.
Speaker 2 (25:45):
You can find it and all the other books.
Speaker 1 (25:47):
We've mentioned today at your favorite independent bookstore.
Speaker 2 (25:54):
That's it for this week's show.
Speaker 1 (25:55):
If you enjoyed it, please tell your friends and rate
and review us. This week, I read This, I'm joined
by James Bradley to discuss his latest novel, Landfall.
Speaker 5 (26:05):
My initial idea was that I wanted to find a
way of writing something which put kind of climate migration
at the center. Like I'd already written several books with
kind of climate in them, but I wanted one that
was more explicitly engaged with kind of questions of justice
and questions of dislocation and refugees and those kinds of issues.
Speaker 1 (26:29):
Read this is a Schwarz Media production made possible thanks
to the generous support of the AAR Group. The show
is produced and edited by Clara Ames, with mixing and
original compositions by Zolten Fletcher. Thanks for listening, See you
next week. Thro
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