This gripping parable could only exist in a post-pandemic world

FICTION
Orpheus Nine
Chris Flynn
Hachette, $32.99

In the acknowledgements section of his new novel, Orpheus Nine, Irish-Australian author Chris Flynn describes how the book’s central premise came to him fully formed in a dream. Once you’ve read the story, this makes perfect sense. His book has the uneasy thrall of a lockdown-era nightmare, but one analysed and refined from a healthy distance by a waking (yet no less feverish) mind.

Orpheus Nine could only exist in a post-pandemic world, and COVID itself looms large throughout via potentially triggering references to “supply chain issues”, “essential services” and “loo-roll related fatalities”. One character laments to another: “Feels like we didn’t learn any lessons from Covid.” And Gods help us, Chris Flynn is saying, should we be faced with another global disaster at an even greater scale.

The book starts with a bang – 130 million bangs, in fact – when, at midnight GMT on an otherwise unremarkable Saturday (11am in the fictional rural Australian town of Gattan), every nine-year-old on the planet stops in their tracks, sings a verse of perfect Latin, fills up with sodium and explodes. (And you thought your five-kilometre radius was tough.) From that moment on, every child is doomed to the same fate the moment they turn nine, and with 350,000 more deaths each day, civilisation itself begins to come apart at the seams.

Gattan, population 7448, is the keyhole through which we watch this absurd and horrid phenomenon play out, and, as in the best speculative fiction, Orpheus Nine curates an ideal cross-section of big small-town personalities to refract every angle of the fallout.

There’s Jess Ward, a wrong-side-of-the-tracks hairdresser who loses her son in the “first wave” while he’s midway through an under-10s soccer game on the Gattan oval. This makes Jess an “Orphean”, a label assigned to parents (mostly mothers) of dead children who, in the absence of concrete answers from governments or scientists, appear increasingly prone to violent online radicalisation.

Then there’s Hayley Carlisle and her wife Jude Tan, who clash over how to parent their eight-year-old, Ebony, as the clock ticks down to her ninth birthday. Hayley goes all in on the “saltless” movement, a “cult-adjacent” wellness trend that espouses cutting all sodium from a child’s diet in the hopes of helping them survive the next wave (but just try stopping your pre-teen from smashing the occasional packet of Twisties).

And lastly there’s Dirk van der Saar, a so-called “Decadian” whose son Alex turned 10 mere weeks before “O9” and is now destined to be part of humanity’s “final generation”. While the Gods have cursed so many, Dirk believes they’ve smiled on him, and he sees this as an opportunity to consolidate his family’s generational wealth and status.