Written as a single sentence, Adam Ouston’s Mine is a novel under the influence

Literature has always been a complex game of repetition and influence. Edward Young’s Conjectures on Original Composition (1759) may have announced the modern preference for original style over imitation, but Harold Bloom’s famous explication of the “anxiety of influence” suggests modern composition is more a matter of inventive reuse than creation ex nihilo. Strong styles produce excellent imitators, who often go on to be major authors in their own right.

Review: Mine – Adam Ouston (Transit Lounge)

There’s no shortage of examples in 20th and 21st century literature. Cormac McCarthy was rightly considered a great stylist, but his style was largely borrowed from William Faulkner (without Faulkner’s baroque punctuation), with elements of Herman Melville and the King James Bible.

The dominance of certain authorial styles persists today. W.G. Sebald may have died 25 years ago, but Sebaldism remains pervasive. Teju Cole, Ben Lerner, Nicolas Rothwell, Martin Edmond, Benjamin Labatut and Agustín Fernández Mallo have all written explicitly Sebaldian works.

The modern Anglophone novel is arguably even more plagued by Bernhardism, perhaps because Thomas Bernhard’s ranting seems so naturally attuned to a world of polarised politics, conspiracy theories and social isolation, in which atomised individuals can yell into the cloud on whatever platform best reflects (or clashes with) their ideological preferences.

Today’s eminent Bernhardians are too numerous to name, but notable works include Sebastian Castillo’s Fresh Green Life, Sam Rivière’s Dead Souls, Jen Craig’s Panthers and the Museum of Fire, Geoff Dyer’s Out of Sheer Rage, Ben Metcalf’s Against the Country, and Mark Haber’s Lesser Ruins.

K-ism

In his second novel Mine, Tasmanian author Adam Ouston is working in the wake of another strong style, that of recent Nobel Laureate Lazlo Krasznahorkai, who is famous for writing long, loping sentences that go on for pages, and whose digressions produce both ratcheting tension and comedic release.

These tendencies reached their most extreme (though arguably not most effective) form in Herscht 07769, published in English in 2024, which is technically one giant sentence.

Australian novelist Gerald Murnane – always reliably grumpy about ungrammatical writing – has complained about this style, arguing that “readers with scant knowledge of traditional grammar are apt to praise for their long sentences writers who do nothing more skilful than the stringing together of loosely linked phrases and clauses”.

On one level, Murnane is correct. Herscht 07769’s long sentence is not quite the technical achievement it appears to be because it contains multiple, independent clauses that are simply unpunctuated. But Kraznahorkai’s long sentences reflect his characters’ complex relationship to a world they are desperate to change, but can never quite get purchase on. The endless sentences mirror their failure to intervene in a reality that requires precise action.

Mine is a one-sentence novel, like Herscht 07769, and its digressive style is overtly indebted to Krasznahorkai. In order to save consonants, let’s call this indebted style K-ism.

Outston’s first novel Waypoints, which was longlisted for the Miles Franklin Award in 2023, was a similarly K-ist work. But his K-ism uses interminable sentences to produce very different effects. Much of this derives from the different situations he dramatises.

Krasznahorkai’s novels typically (though not always) include an otherworldly naif, somewhat in vein of Prince Myshkin from Dostoevsky’s The Idiot. The childlike innocence and virtue of these characters are often counterpoised with a highly intellectual character with expert knowledge of a given field.

In The Melancholy of Resistance, for example, the unsophisticated postman János Valuska exists in a dyad with György Eszter, a former musicologist obsessed with musical tunings. In Herscht 07769, the enormous but innocent Florian Herscht becomes concerned the world might end after speaking with his friend Herr Köhler, a former teacher of physics.

Ouston’s K-ism, by contrast, follows the thoughts of single characters, who might be described as intellectual dilettantes. These protagonists internalise the split between naivety and expertise in Krasznahorkai’s fiction.

Waypoints’ protagonist, Bernard Cripp, is an independently wealthy circus owner who becomes obsessed with two seemingly unrelated events in the history of aviation: Harry Houdini’s flight of a powered plane at Digger’s Rest, Victoria, in 1910 and the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 in 2014.

The unnamed protagonist of Mine, referred to as “the poet”, teaches across disciplines at an unnamed university and has become semi-renowned for yelling “Bullshit!” in relation to ideas he disagrees with in class. In this sense, Mine is an unexpected contribution to the micro-genre of the academic novel known as “adjunct lit”, alongside such novels as Castillo’s Fresh Green Life and Christine Smallwood’s The Life of the Mind.

The poet is a would-be polymath. He is a “university lecturer, poet, bushwalker activist, old, so old, he was also miserable, a condition he carried with him like a tombstone or a stone egg”. In his misery, he represents a very specific demographic of the liberal precariat that sociologist Pierre Bourdieu called the “dominated fraction of the dominant class”.

is the bourgeois socialist doomscroller par excellence.

The howling beneath the earth

If Bernard Cripp is emotionally and intellectually isolated, the poet of Mine is isolated in a far more material way: he has fallen into an abandoned mine shaft in remote western Tasmania. He lays there, injured and trapped underground, hoping for rescue.

Both the novel’s premise and its opening appear to be a hidden K-ism. They draw on a specific moment in one of Krasznahorkai’s novels: the ending of the novel-in-stories Seiobo There Below, whose final section, The Screaming Beneath the Earth, describes the Terracotta Army of Chinese emperor Qin Shi Huang:

blindly they scream in the darkness, they scream that this was awaiting them, this awaited the Shangs, but that up there above, the same fate awaits us, it awaits us who now reflect upon the Shang, the horror, which is not just the residue of some cheap fear: for there is a domain, that of death, the dreadful weight of the earth pressing in from all sides which has entombed them, and which in time shall devour us as well, to close it in upon itself, to bury, to consume even our memories, beyond all that is eternal.

Such echoes in novels under the influence of a strong style are not uncommon (for example, the discussion of bedbugs in Teju Cole’s Open City is an implicit reference to the discussion of silkworms in Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn). But Ouston’s borrowing is both more specific and more oblique. Mine opens with the poet already trapped in the mine. Its first lines also describe a screaming beneath the earth, a “howl” that is

terrifying in the sheer mass it had acquired, for it was, this howl, not so much something he’d done but something that was being done to him, as though the rock walls of the shaft had acquired the language, the means, the power with which to express themselves.

The repetition of Krasznahorkai’s underground scream can only be read as intentional. One of the many implications of Mine’s title is the appropriation of someone else’s ideas as one’s own. This is also one of the many ways the novel subtly alludes to the colonial appropriation of Aboriginal lands.

The opening situation of Mine sounds dramatic, but its narrative is static. Here Ouston’s K-ism diverges from Krasznahorkai’s fiction, which involves dramatic situations and something like traditional plots (often, quite a lot happens in his novels).

One could argue that Ouston’s K-ism also contains a lot of Bernhardism – it’s no coincidence that Waypoints’ narrator is named Bernard. The difference is that his characters ruminate and perseverate where Bernhard’s would rant. While the narrator of Bernhard’s Woodcutters chooses to spend half the novel in an armchair in the foyer outside a party, the unnamed narrator of Mine is trapped underground and injured. Aside from crawling towards water, encountering bioluminescence, and occasionally reacting to a strange voice deeper within the mine, little happens there.

The setting is mined for its metaphorical significance. The poet’s unintentional katabasis is Dantean. He is also a literal Underground Man (as the unnamed narrator of Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground is commonly called).

Stuck in a shadowy zone between life and death, the poet reveals his purgatorial intellectual fixation to create a “hauntology” of Tasmania. This term was famously coined by philosopher Jacques Derrida in Specters of Marx, and enlarged upon by the cultural theorist Mark Fisher, under his alias K-Punk (another K), to examine the ways that the present moment remains trapped in a loop of overdetermined history from which there is no escape.

Once again, the poet’s literal entrapment is also a metaphorical one.

Hauntology

If this all sounds dull and overly intellectualised, then it is to Ouston’s credit that the novel is anything but this, as the poet’s recollections are overtaken by an urgent recollection of brutal histories.

The poet’s hauntology is what impelled him to Chester in western Tasmania, a former company town run by the Mount Lyell Mining and Railway Company, now a ghost town. This is the literal “mine” of the title.

Here, the poet encounters an odd group of people or, more likely, ghosts who live among the ruins (another K-ism that recalls Satantango). One appears to warn the poet of the boundary that he is about to cross:

To think this all used to be the mouth of hell […] Imagine travelling all this way, from all over the world, to wind up staring the devil in the face.

His most significant encounter is with Louisa Orr (pun intended), a demonic psychopomp or inverted Beatrice, who pushes the poet into the mine shaft and appears later both to taunt and, in one of the novel’s many slapstick moments, urinate on him.

Ironically, it is only in the mine that the poet can complete his hauntology, which oscillates between two deadly events that occurred at roughly the same time: the Mount Lyell mine fire of 1912 and Douglas Mawson’s expedition to Antarctica from 1911-14.

The majority of the novel is dedicated to an inventive retelling of the creation of the Mount Lyell mine and the horrific mistreatment of the natural world and the workers at the behest of industry and government. Mine explicitly connects this historical event with ongoing Tasmanian corruption and cronyism. It suggests that the state’s institutions are run by the second-rate failsons and faildaughters of a squattocracy, inept at doing anything other than maintaining their own wealth and standing.

One needn’t look far for real-life examples that relate directly to Mine. In 2024, it was revealed that the newly commissioned Antarctic icebreaker, RSV Nuyina, would not be able to dock in Hobart. It would have to refuel on the other side of the island, because no one had realised it was too large to pass safely under Hobart’s Tasman Bridge. This occurred in a project valued at A$1.9 billion dollars in a state of fewer than 600,000 inhabitants, which has the highest illiteracy rate in Australia and lacks basic infrastructure in many areas.

Tasmania arguably remains the most poorly managed state in Australia, which, if you know anything about Australian state politics, is a major achievement.

The novel locates these criticisms in the poet’s recently deceased friend,

the boisterous, roguish journalist, clad perennially in black motorcycle leathers […] who’d defected from a lengthy tenure at the state’s mainstream masthead, citing dismay at the deep corruption, hypocrisy and conflicts of interest.

The novel explicitly ties the journalist’s work with the longer history of malevolent acts, like those of the Mount Lyell Mining and Railway Company that resulted in the 1912 fire. As the poet says early on, foreshadowing the callous disregard for life that the company’s conduct displays,

you could get away with blue murder on a tiny island at the bottom of the planet […] as long as you kept quiet you wouldn’t ruffle too many feathers, because the only feathers worth a damn were those belonging to the geese who ran the place.

While the Mount Lyell fire initially appears to represent the climax of the book, it is followed by another series of reflections on Mawson’s brutal South Pole expedition. This might initially appear unconnected for those who do not realise that Hobart houses not one, but two separate replicas of Mawson’s Antarctic Hut and that the city is home to an institute of Antarctic studies. Hobart has often been connected to the South Pole, not only as the real point of departure for Mawson in 1911, but also as the fictional point of departure in H.P. Lovecraft’s horror story At the Mountains of Madness (1931).

Ouston deftly imbricates this material in ways that are surprising, bleakly funny and terrifying in equal measure. What ultimately links the two historical events are the coincidence of colonisation and an ideology that viewed nature as the raw material for human exploration and exploitation.

Some critics have complained that Mine does not more explicitly deal with the enormity of Aboriginal dispossession and genocide in Tasmania, but this is a failure to connect the dots in the novel where this absence is intentionally conspicuous.

Mine repeatedly notes Tasmania has “the cleanest air in the world”. This is a genuine and often repeated point of local pride. It has also become part of the state’s broader commercialism of environmental tourism. This is itself linked to Tasmania’s long and well-established history of political environmentalism, which Mine also notes:

the infernal chip on the shoulder protesting pulp mills, dams, deforestation, and the grubby practices of governing bodies, old-fashioned Tasmanian dissent facing off against old-fashioned Tasmanian corruption, conservation versus conservatism, microcosm for the country at large, the world at large.

The novel’s depiction of an underground airborne toxic event, the result of a hellish explosion (yet another meaning of “mine” is an explosive device), starkly reveals the contradictions between Tasmania’s conception of itself and its history of human and environmental devastation. This may not be an original point, but it is one that is complexly and stylishly made in a novel that borrows styles in order to make them its own.