Deception is Michael Meehan’s third novel, following on from the award-winners The Salt of Broken Tears in 2000 and Stormy Weather in 2002. Deception’s central character is Nick Lethbridge, a young Australian law graduate who makes his way to Paris during the volatile days of student riots in 1968. Nick is seeking to unravel the story behind a manuscript left to him by his French-born grandmother, whose family fled to the Australian outback in the wake of the siege of Paris and the subsequent bloody Commune of 1870. As he works with the attractive scholar Julia to translate and interpret the manuscript, and meets his aged great-aunts and finds out more about his family, a tangled truth buried by history begins to emerge. I suspect this will be a book that polarises readers. Some may think its tone is ‘poetic’ while others are likely to find it ‘flowery’. Some may think of its structure as ‘elusive’ but others will no doubt be frustrated and find it needlessly opaque and confusing. For those who like to talk about books-be they in undergrad uni courses or readinggroups-there is plenty here to spark discussions. But those seeking a straightforward historical novel should probably be directed elsewhere.

Tim Coronel is publisher of Bookseller+Publisher

This review from Australian Bookseller & Publisher magazine is reproduced by kind permission of Thorpe-Bowker, a division of R R Bowker LLC. © Copyright 2008, Thorpe-Bowker

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