Mixed Business

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. Propelled at times (though never exclusively) by politics, there is, of course, plenty of room for satire. The scope of the tales ranges from tragedy to tragicomedy to comedy to farce, with all the muses contributing. Given there are over one hundred characters in the cast, this is a book to be seen as a risky, imaginative, large-scale history of 20th and 21st Century urban Australia.

Mixed Business offers a broad sweep across Melbourne's past century. It is sharply observed, written as a fine verse novel, with poet Alan Wearne exhibiting a rare historical and sociological imagination. 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