rom: The Sydney Morning Herald
Saturday, 7 October, 2000
Review by John Birmingham (author of He Died With A Felafel In His Hand and Leviathan)

enius at Work

To every generation is born a genius, a Michelangelo, a Shakespeare, an Erwin Rommel. Sadly, home-baked Australian genii have been a little thin on the ground, at least in the world of literature.

Oh, sure, your pointy-headed types might sport a bookish woody for Patrick White and his so-called Nobel prize. But did any of Patrick White's characters face certain death by plummeting over a massive Antarctic ice cliff in a shot-to-hell hovercraft while being pursued by a bunch of murderous British SAS guys, only to whip out some bodacious James Bond-style moves leading to a heavy arsewhoopin' for aforesaid SAS guys? Did any of White's so-called novels ever feature attacks by pods of murderous killer whales, intergalactic OK Corral shoot-outs in the New York Public Library or secret weapons built out of lost Aztec relics so powerful they could blow a third of the Earth's planetary mass into orbit around Jupiter? Well, did they?

If the answer is a solid uh ... no, as you and I know know it is, Patrick White can hand over his propeller beanie of genius to the one author of world stature our so-called literary community has ever produced. That author's name is Matthew Reilly.

Reilly first burst through the flimsy plywood door of literature like a heavily-armed and badly drug-affected special forces renegade with a self-published gem called Contest (re-released next month by Pan Macmillan, $27.40). Reilly, like the best writers, is unafraid to address the timeless verities of the human condition, such as the little-known verity that every 100 years a champion is chosen from among us to do battle against a pack of bloodthirsty space gorillas, shapeshifters, biomechanical attack pooches and alligator chicks. The sole survivor is declared the most kickarse species of the century. Through an error in talent-spotting procedures, we don't get represented by Arnie or Jean-Claude. Instead, a radiologist, Dr Stephen Swain, single dad of eight-year-old Holly, is left with little more than a Bic lighter to save his hide and his daughter. Can he do it? Is the human race the most kickarse race in the Milky Way? Need you ask?

For once, the publishing industry was on the ball and recognised in Contest the arrival of a rare talent. Pan Macmillan signed up Ice Station ($18.60), the work which would establish Reilly in airport bookstores worldwide. Ice Station presents as a hyper-accelerated sci-fi shooter, with Lieutenant Shane M. Schofield (aka Scarecrow, because of the two vertical scars that slash through his eyes), leading a marine recon team into a lethal crossfire at an Antarctic research station. Foreign special forces teams, all of them chock full of violent nuts, battle to reach the possible crash site of an alien spacecraft.

The genius of this work is its unrelenting pace. The hovercraft scenario takes place over several pages in Ice Station. Picture this. You're being pursued across the ice by half a dozen or so SAS hovercraft. Your only ally is a hopeless dufus of a scientist. You plunge over a huge cliff? Violent death below. Violent death above. You're falling, falling. Are you going to live? These are the big questions Reilly asks on every second page. I mean that. Every second page. Sometimes twice in one paragraph. I don't think Patrick White asked the hovercraft question once in Voss.

Thankfully, White is dead now and so valuable shelf space in megabarn bookmarts can be more fruitfully given over to Reilly's most recent release, Temple (Pan Macmillan, $18.55), a state-of-the-art thriller with competing teams of ruthless killers and stumbling heroes in different centuries, searching for a lost artefact with which to blow up the world. You know you are in the presence of a major new talent in the opening pages when a pack of post-modern SS goons invades a monastery and shoots everybody in the head.

Modern Australian literature has many failings. Specifically, it's very, very boring. Matt Reilly, genius, has addressed the issue of what to put in between the interesting bits - and there can be only one reward. Five big cheeseburgers.

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