SOURCE: “Desert Hearts,” in New Statesman, October 4, 1996, p. 45.

In the following review, Brandon offers a positive assessment of Oyster.

If you want to write novels these days, the old white Commonwealth is the place to be born. There's a sweep and poetic confidence in the work of a Rushdie, a Malouf, or in the Newfoundland of Annie Proulx, that leaves most English novels looking tame and parochial. Janette Turner Hospital (born in Australia, living in Canada) is up there with the very best.

Oyster is about demagoguery, mass hysteria and the closed communities in which they flourish. To the Queensland opal-mining townlet of Outer Maroo, lost in the western outback, comes the mysterious and charismatic Oyster. He, too, is drawn by opals, but also by the prospect of power. He sets himself up as leader of a millennial community just outside town. Young people in search of a...