This is a big and strange book - a national epic, you might say. I’ve taken to describing it as being Australia’s ‘Midnight’s Children’, which is about as accurate as you can really get without actually saying anything about it. There probably isn’t, in reality, anything as tidy as the Great Australian Novel (and Illywhacker certainly is anything but tidy), but this should take a prominent place in any discussion about the theoretical G.A.N., since its massive enough and disgusting enough and honest enough and beautiful enough and surprising enough and weird enough to represent its country as well (or better, even) than any other.