Wayne Macauley

I am small, says Walser. I am not only not bigger and more important than you, I am quite possibly a good deal smaller and less important. You won’t learn anything magnificent from a Walser narrator; in fact, he would be the first to declare himself on important matters a complete ignoramus. But put his words in the mouth of an actor in front of an audience and you quickly feel how intimate, eccentric, funny and honest his particular form of personal address is.

When Fallada handed the final draft of Little Man, What Now? to Rowohlt in early 1932 there were eight and half million people unemployed in Germany. By 1933, a staggering 40 per cent of the population was registered as out of work.

When we are faced with a world whose problems all seem ‘wicked’ and intractable, what is it that fiction can do?

Macauley’s novels are often fantastical or absurd in their logic, but the colours and settings seem deliberately banal – focusing as they do on the type of place under-studied in Australian literature. Macauley frames these exurban fringes from vantage points and under circumstances that expose how cold and labyrinthine our modern civilization can be; he sheds light on how unhomely the city is when you’re on the wrong side of a picket fence.’

In appropriating Demons for the title of his fourth novel, Wayne Macauley alludes not only to Dostoevsky’s Demons (which he also quotes in the Pevear and Volokhonsky translation), but to the title’s biblical provenance. Near the end of Macauley’s Demons, in the holiday house off the Great Ocean Road where he traps his characters for the weekend, a secret is exposed and the cabin fever gives way to a physical confrontation.