Book Review: Betrayals

In 1998, Ian Callinan was appointed a justice of the High Court of Australia. His writing of fiction has occurred before, during and after his time on Australia’s Supreme Court. He has published six earlier novels and a number of plays.

Betrayals is a grand sweep of a novel. Its action encompasses events in Rumania and Russia from the 1920s onwards and events in Australia and England over nearly the same period. The novel concludes its action in the early years of the twenty-first century.

The narrative focuses upon two star-crossed lovers who met while studying history at Queensland University at Saint Lucia in the first half of the 1960s. Circumstances tear them apart but their great chance for reconciliation and mutual redemption involves a trip with an Australian trade delegation to Bucharest in 1989 in the dying days of the Cold War.

Tim Fallon, the male of the pair, comes from a working class background but eschews political involvement. He is called up for national service and waives his right to a deferral. His experience of hot action in Vietnam leads to an honourable medical discharge but leaves him at a loose end, emotionally.

A mentor lecturer, conservative for the times, guides him to a life in a fictionalised version of ASIS, Australia’s overseas spy agency. In humanising Australia’s spies, Betrayals recalls a little Christopher Koch’s 2007 novel, The Memory Room.

His almost student days lover, Cecily, comes from a privileged and wealthy background. She takes refuge in her brilliant mind and finds employment and academic success as an economic historian of the Balkan region.

The novel is told in chapters set in a particular place and time. However, the chapters do not follow chronologically with some early chapters describing events which happen at or near the end of the narrative. The reader hurtles back and forth with the action receiving the outline of the puzzle but still awaiting the extra pieces to provide the detail and the understanding.

Enough of the action meets the description which makes up the title. It remains unclear, however, at the end of the action, whether betrayals are the product of flawed moralities of the book’s protagonists or the result of the fates tossing their human playthings like corks on an inclement ocean.