AustLit

'The terrorist has become a familiar figure and terrorism a common referent in recent Australian writing. I intend to explore a handful of Australian novels published, like [Janet Turner] Hospital's work , since 2001 : A.L. McCann's Subtopia (2005), Linda Jaivin's The Infernal Optimist (2006), Richard Flanagan's The Unknown Terrorist (2006), and Andrew McGahan's Underground (2006). All of these novels entered a world attuned to the destructive potential of the terrorist and wary of the terrorist desire to wreak and skill at wreaking havoc.'

David Sornig explores the idea that Andrew McCann's Subtopia and Christos Tsiolkas's Dead Europe render 'versions of Berlin, and engage the narrative uncertainty of the fall of the Berlin Wall in a way that can be read to follow from Derrida's exploration of the logic of the ghost, the hauntology he describes in Specters of Marx, which suggests that the presence of the past should be interrogated not as a final post-Historical object, as Fukuyama [in The End of History and The Last Man] might suggest, but rather as this heterogeneous inheritance, as multiple as its iterations'.

Sornig discusses the ways in which McCann's and Tsiolkas's narratives 'weigh the eschatological status of Berlin'.