There's an immediate, palpable attraction between the gifted Australian musician and the mathematician, who resembles a radiant Rossetti portrait.
Leela, an intellectual refugee from the rural town of Promised Land, S.C., where her father, Gideon Moore, is a Pentecostal preacher, is doing a postdoc at MIT. Mishka has fled an idyllic, but suffocating, rainforest home in conservative Queensland to pursue a PhD in music at Harvard.
Deep South American sizzles with Deep North Australian. Uniquely placed to evoke this fiery attachment, Hospital grew up in Queensland, taught in Cambridge, and is now professor of English at the University of South Carolina. Her books often examine dislocation and expatriation. "Orpheus Lost," with its marriage of mathematical theory and musical notation, is particularly reminiscent of her wildly imaginative "Charades."
Here, "background" characters and settings are not echoes, but vital, profound presences. Leela maintains deep feelings for her small Southern town, her family, and her former boyfriend Cobb Slaughter, who now serves in a private security firm on terrorist alert. Mishka's dreams flutter through the lush Daintree rainforest, where he lived with his Hungarian Holocaust-survivor grandparents, reclusive uncle Otto, and his wistful, widowed mother.
Hospital's chilling portrayal of the unchecked power of mercenaries in Cobb's private security force is all too timely: kidnaps, renditions, torture, "ghosted" prisoners lost in the secret labyrinths of international militias. She is equally unflinching in revealing Leela's memories of racist violence in South Carolina and her current encounters with academic misogyny. Mishka discovers he is a descendant of both the Jewish and Arabic diasporas. Suddenly one day he also learns his father is still alive. Marwan Rahal Abukir summons the long-lost son to Beirut.
