Book Club - Chris Flynn’s Orpheus Nine

If I’ve learned anything in my time covering Australian writing it’s to never underestimate Chris Flynn. Chris is the award winning author of Mammoth - the story of a loquacious fossil, The Glass Kingdom - a drug fueled romp through outback Australia and perhaps the strangest of all Here Be Leviathans - a collection of Monkey’s, Platypuses and Sabretooth Tigers working well outside their pay grade.  Chris is back with his new novel Orpheus Nine and he’s going to hold up the mirror once again whether we’re ready or not… And just a quick content warning that this narrative talks about death and pandemics, just in case you don’t want to hear about that… On a Saturday morning in the small coastal town of Gattan, families are gathered for the local under tens footy when it happens. One moment all eyes are on the action of the game, the next, confusion reigns as all the players, bar one stand stock still, frozen on the pitch. Next comes the eerie chorus from the players; a line in Latin from King Lear, “As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods. They kill us for their sport” before all dropping dead. The horror inflicted on Gattan is repeated all over the world. Scientists are helpless to explain why children aged nine are dying when they reach their ninth birthday. In Gattan families are struggling to understand the tragedy and it quickly threatens community cohesion. Families of the dead are known as Orpheans and are pariahs in their own town. Meanwhile the families of ten year olds are regarded with suspicion, while those families of eight year olds desperately search for a way out. On its surface Orpheus Nine looks like a book about the pandemic. It certainly references Covid-19, even if it’s to show how much worse the Orpheus Nine crisis is becoming. Through the novel we see something of the calamity that could have been. More than the global terror that often felt so far removed from our everyday lives, Orpheus Nine shows us how we suffered at the personal and community level. By focussing in on the fictional town of Gattan, Flynn shows us the cost of the tragedy across the town. How the deaths were only the beginning as mistrust quickly spread and families and friends come to question their loyalties.  The novel shows us the roots of the mistrust that festers when everything goes wrong and challenges the notion that banding together is protective, when people can be so quick to turn on each other and declare you now an outsider. There’s also something of a mystery at the heart of the novel. This isn’t the promised answer that we all secretly hope might save us in these impossible situations. Rather Orpheus Nine shows us how futile our situation is in the face of enormous threats. Or at least how futile things are when our best bet is just to continue with the same petty complaints we’ve always held.