CHRIS FLYNN Orpheus Nine. Reviewed by Robert Goodman

The dystopian new novel from the author of Mammoth imagines a shocking, and ongoing, tragedy to explore grief, community, and anger.  

Chris Flynn opens his new novel Orpheus Nine with a staggering, horrifying scene. At a children’s soccer game in Gattan, a small country town in Australia, all of the nine year olds stop ‘as if some god’s finger had pressed the pause button on their universal remote’, then sing a line in Latin, which is in fact a quotation from King Lear:

As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods;

They kill us for their sport.

And then:

Within sixty seconds every nine year old on the planet was dead, and the screams of brothers, sisters and parents echoed across the world.

There are plenty of literary apocalypses out there – viruses, zombies, robots, aliens. Chris Flynn, much in the vein of Stephen King or the TV series The Leftovers, brings us the horror-driven apocalypse. No reason, no explanation. Just people trying to deal with the fallout of an unimaginable supernatural tragedy that is ongoing, as every day following this initial event, children who turn nine die in the same way.

Three hundred and fifty thousand more every day since, each struck down at midnight GMT, the moment of their ninth birthday. For months now. And still no solutions. It wasn’t a virus, it wasn’t a fungal infection, it wasn’t a biological terrorist attack, it wasn’t an M. Night Shyamalan movie, and there was no way to prevent kids … dying horribly in front of their distraught parents.

Flynn is able to use this premise to explore real-world issues of grief, class, infidelity and belief.

Orpheus Nine focusses on three Gattan citizens: Jessie, now an ‘Orphean’ whose son Ryan died on that soccer field; Dirk, a ‘decadean’, whose son Alex, at ten years and ten weeks old, survived; and Hayley, whose daughter Ebony is eight and facing dying on her ninth birthday. Flynn follows their different trajectories but also digs into their complicated pasts. This is still small-town Australia, so the three have known each other since they were children and carry those past interactions with them into this tragedy.

Through Jess, Flynn explores issues of grief, how we process it and how we deal with it. In the beginning, Jess is inundated with people trying to support her, but she knows better:

Jess was tired of the trauma vampires. They weren’t sorry for her, not really. They just wanted to be involved somehow – it was almost as if they wished O9 had happened to them. So they talked about their own grief, as if it could compare.

She finds the need to connect with mothers like herself and does so by visiting Ryan’s grave:

These hastily created cemeteries were called Nineyards … It was also the best place to meet other Orpheans, the bittersweet name that had been bestowed upon parents who’d lost a child. Each time Jess visited the Nineyard, she experienced a sense of genuine community that was absent for all the other aspects of her life. These were her people.

But this sense of community soon metastasises into something else: a global terrorist group called the Kingdom of Hades, although it is unclear what this group is trying to achieve, other than lashing out. The group is symptomatic of the global unrest that has followed the onset of Orpheus 9, and less than a year later:

… thirty-six nations had been embroiled in civil unrest. There had been violent uprisings, bloody revolutions, brutal responses from beleaguered authority figures. Several governments had been deposed, and the replacement regimes fared no better … Societies everywhere had split into factions …

Under intense pressure, the Australian prime minister had stepped down. His replacement, a party man with a bellyful of empty promises, only lasted eighteen days. He was trampled to death by a crowd of angry parents outside Parliament House … For the most part, Australia had become a lawless place. Its cities were in chaos.

By setting his action in a small country town, Flynn is able to avoid some of this chaos. He uses Gattan to explore the global scenario in microcosm, but he also makes the town remote and self-sufficient enough that they have the resources to survive a global upheaval.

Meanwhile, Hayley has become one of the ‘Saltless’. As the Orpheus Nine syndrome seems to result from a sudden increase in sodium, there is a widespread belief that preventing eight-year-olds from ingesting salt will save them from the condition. But Ebony, despite living with a countdown clock, just wants to be a normal kid and is constantly fighting against her mother’s restrictions.

And Dirk, whose family had always been in the upper echelon of Gattan and believes that ‘Triumph was in their genes’, just sees Orpheus Nine as providing new opportunities for power. At one point he tries to enlist Alex, still traumatised from watching all of his friends die horribly, into his plans:

‘We’ll be making the rules from now on, Alex,’ Dirk told him. ‘You’re pretty good with weapons, eh? Better shot than me.’

‘That’s just in games though,’ Alex said. ‘I’ve never fired a gun for real …’

‘… We need to stand up for ourselves in Gattan … You’re the last generation, son. You will have to stand ready.’

Flynn builds to a clever, multifaceted climax that draws much of its power from our understanding of these three characters and their shifting relationships over time.

In some ways, Orpheus Nine goes down typical post-apocalyptic lines that readers will be very familiar with from properties like Stephen King’s The Stand, or The Last of Us or Station 11: the rise of resistance groups (although it is unclear what they are actually resisting), the chancers who take advantage of the power vacuum, the people trying to make sense of a world that has ceased to make sense. But it is clear where Flynn’s inspiration has come from – there are numerous explicit and sly references to Covid-19:

The emergency was unlike any of the others that had slammed humanity in recent years. There was no vaccine. No restrictions on societal movement. No plan to arrest the melting permafrost. No demagogue to save the day.

Flynn looks at how people survive an unimaginable disaster but is actually asking another question: why are we acting like this when we are faced with global challenges that we can actually address?

If there is a caveat to Orpheus Nine it would be with readers’ willingness to just go with the premise. At no time does Flynn explain why this is happening. Okay, nine year olds are dying, but what is it with the singing of Shakespeare in Latin? It’s creepy and a little bit freaky and makes for a truly great and horrifying opening scene, but it’s never explored or explained and it is unclear if Flynn even knows where to go with it, except that it is a great catalyst for exploring other issues. And then without any evidence, the women of the Kingdom of Hades develop a theory around the number nine and its significance, which bizarrely turns out to have some validity.

Orpheus Nine joins a long list of post-apocalyptic works in which some tragic, inexplicable event drives the world into new social and political forms. As with many of the better examples of this genre, the question is how Flynn uses his premise to explore broader issues and the tensions that are alive in modern Australia. And in this respect Orpheus Nine succeeds. Flynn uses a fever-dream idea to effectively explore a range of themes, including how we deal with tragedy and grief, persistent class distinctions, and the impacts of unfocused anger at those in power.

Chris Flynn Orpheus Nine UQP 2025 PB Hachette 288pp $32.99

Robert Goodman is an institutionalised public servant and obsessive reader, who won a science fiction short-story competition very early in his career but has found reviewing a better outlet for his skills. He is a judge of the Ned Kelly Awards and reviews for a number of other publications – see his website: www.pilebythebed.com

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Tags: Australian authors, catastrophe, Chris | Flynn, community, dystopian fiction, grief, King Lear, post-apocalyptic fiction, small towns