Orpheus Lost - Softcover

Janette Turner Hospital

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0732284414 ISBN 13: 9780732284411

Publisher: Fourth Estate, 2007

Synopsis

In the ancient myth, it is Orpheus who travels to the underworld to rescue his lover Eurydice from death. In this compelling reimagining of the Orpheus story, Leela May travels into an underworld of kidnapping, torture and despair in search of her lover, Mishka. Leela is a mathematical genius who escaped her hardscrabble Southern home town to study in Boston. It's there that she meets a young Australian musician, Mishka. From the moment she first hears him play, busking in a subway, his music grips her, and they quickly become lovers. Then one day Leela is picked up off the street and taken to an interrogation centre somewhere outside the city. There has been an 'incident', an explosion on the underground; terrorists are suspected, security is high. And her old childhood friend Cobb is conducting a very questionable interrogation. Over the years Cobb has never forgotten Leela and the secrets she knows. Now he reveals to her that Mishka may not be all he seems. That there may be more to him than growing up in the Daintree rainforest in northern Queensland in an eccentric musical family. Leela has already discovered on her own account that some nights when Mishka claims to be at the music lab are actually spent at a cafe. A cafe, Cobb tells her, known to be a terrorist contact point. Who can she believe? And then Mishka disappears. In this powerful and passionate novel Janette Turner Hospital tackles head-on questions of liberty and national security, terrorism and love.

About this title

Review:

Hospital (North of Nowhere, South of Loss, 2004, etc.) turns the mythical tables, sending a modern-day Eurydice to hellish secret interrogation facilities in search of her Orpheus, a musician suspected of terrorist ties.Leela, a graduate student at MIT, falls in love with Mishka, the grandson of Hungarian Holocaust survivors who grew up in remote rural Australia. He's in Boston studying music, but he has an odd habit of disappearing after each of the terrorist bombings that now regularly disrupt the city. (The unspecified time seems to be the very near future.) After an explosion on the Red Line, Leela is kidnapped and taken to an "interview room," where her chief interrogator is Cobb, a boy she grew up with in Promised Land, S.C. The tortured son of an abusive, alcoholic Vietnam vet, Cobb was as much of a misfit as Leela, the openly promiscuous daughter of a preacher. But he despised her liberal views and was insanely jealous of her lovers. In a truly creepy interrogation scene, Cobb tells Leela that Mishka's real name is Mikael Abukir and he's been seen visiting a Boston mosque with the man who blew himself up on the Red Line; Cobb also shows her photos that make it clear he's been following her every move. The stage seems set for a horrific tale of vengeance and destruction, especially as readers learn with Mishka that the father he never knew (a Lebanese student in Sydney who supposedly died after he got Mishka's mother pregnant) is now a notorious Muslim fundamentalist. Has gentle Mishka been lured into terrorism as a means of connecting with his father? To what gruesome ends will Cobb's rage take him? The answers turn out to be more optimistic than the grim opening chapters indicate. The themes of redemption and reconciliation are not quite as electrifying as the author's scary portrait of an America deformed by fear and anger, but a novel that grapples so thoughtfully with such resonant issues demands close attention. (Kirkus Reviews)

About the Author:

Janette Turner Hospital received Australia's Patrick White Award for lifetime literary achievement, and is Distinguished Professor of English at the University of South Carolina. She lives in Columbia, South Carolina.

About this edition

• Publisher: Fourth Estate
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 0732284414
• ISBN 13: 9780732284411
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1