Mixed Business
Puncher & Wattman. Waratah, NSW. 2022
ISBN 9781923099265
A sequence of inter-connected narratives from pre–World War One to the 2020s, Mixed Business is Alan Wearne’s latest contribution to the verse novel genre. With a cast of over one hundred characters, this book is a risky, imaginative, large-scale history of 20th and 21st Century urban Australia. Propelled at times (though never exclusively) by politics, there is of course plenty of room for satire. With all the muses contributing, the tales told range from tragedy to tragicomedy to comedy to farce.
BACK COVER QUOTES
Mixed Business offers a broad sweep across Melbourne’s past century; it is sharply observed, written as a fine verse novel. With his rare historical and sociological imagination, poet Alan Wearne brilliantly succeeds in his aim of ‘trying to capture how Australians yap/ with use of rhyme to give that extra snap.’ Jim Davidson
Alan Wearne’s Mixed Business is an epic adventure, its energies tied poetically to the everyday. Wearne introduces a cast of characters whose voices, and those of their descendants, speak to each other across the manuscript’s over-a-100-year span. Each narrative, whether a domestic or political saga, has its own social and cultural imprint. A reader is guided down streams of consciousness where Wearne’s subtlety with the natural rhythms of vernacular registers plays into and against the intellectual toughness of his satire. With discursive shifts between the charming and the garrulous Wearne’s lens is, as always, on the social contract between individuals, its harmonies and disruptions.
Michelle Borzi
Of Australia’s poets Wearne may be most like ‘Banjo’ Paterson, without regional pretensions and with fewer animals. Or he may be a late last flowering of social realism, albeit in a liberal-democratic key. Whatever Wearne is and to whom, this is an odd book, in the best sense, that is sure to startle the younger generations.
And you’re probably in it.
A J Carruthers