AustLit

'By the fifth page of Wayne Macauley’s fifth novel, Some Tests, the title is already a kind of refrain. Or at least the words – some tests – recur and resonate with a vague, tuneful importance. By the novel’s middle section it becomes an ominous chant, like the phrase that punctuates a nauseating chorus. Protagonist Beth Own, a middle-aged nurse with two young daughters and an accountant husband hellbent on costly renovation, is instructed by her locum doctor to take ‘some tests’, and then ‘some more tests’, and then some ‘proper, rigorous tests’. And it seems that she will go on taking these tests, and learning of the need for even more tests, with scarcely the time to wonder what the tests are about or what they could mean. She can only suspect that there is something critically wrong with her. And although only a ‘lethargy and general unwellness’ has befallen her, it seems, sometimes, during her journey towards more and more tests, that she might even die.' (Introduction)

'If nothing else, one thing guaranteed in any Wayne Macauley work of fiction is that its surface is just that: a vehicle inside of which the real messages are carried. What makes Macauley’s novels exceptional is these messages are always vital — they are the mes­sages we’ve been asking ourselves for millennia, in one way or another — but also the surface story-vehicle that carries these messages is compelling in its own right.' (Introduction)