The Chantic Bird is one of Ireland's harsher, stranger novels: a book of masculine decay, sexual unease, social grotesquerie, and moral corrosion.

Ireland is very good at making ordinary Australian life feel spiritually rotten without ever becoming theatrical about it. The novel circles a damaged male consciousness and the humiliations, compulsions, and fantasies that accumulate around it; it’s abrasive, darkly comic, and not remotely interested in making itself pleasant.

That difficulty is part of the appeal, it sits well with readers who like postwar Australian fiction at its most ugly, intelligent, and unsentimental.