Iain Ryan is the Ned Kelly Shortlisted author of Four Days and the Student.
In the Spiral...
Erma Bridges is tired. She just got off a thirty six hour flight to answer as yet unknown charges of misconduct from her university. A university where young women are disappearing at an alarming rate. A university where one young woman, Erma’s missing research assistant, is about to reappear and brutally attack Erma for seemingly no discernible reason.
When Erma wakes from the shocking attack she must try and piece together what has happened to her life. Why did her research assistant turn on her. Did it have anything to do with her book on the History of Reader Deployed Young Adult Fiction and the missing interviews with an elusive author?
Ryan’s opening immediately throws the reader off balance. Erma is seemingly being targeted on all sides by forces she can barely comprehend.
As she throws herself into Brisbane’s underworld in the search for answers she must also confront her own part in the unfolding events.
Erma’s story in The Spiral is twinned with that of a mysterious barbarian named Sero. Sero emerges from Erma’s unconscious and moves inexorably forward in a quest to recover their memory.
Sero is all brute strength and violence, occupying a world straight out of horror/fantasy.
The fascinating conceit of Sero’s existence is they are told through the second person. The being, seemingly of Erma’s creation becomes a proxy for our own movement through the narrative.
Identification and control are central to Ryan’s unfolding story. Erma does not like having control wrested from her. Behind the academic sounding title Erma’s thesis is focussed on Choose Your Own Adventure books (remember them?) and she seeks the certainties of choice and consequence those books offered her as a teen.
Sero seems drawn straight from one of these books but their path is linear, no choices but to move forward. That is until Erma is brought to a crisis point.
Approaching its penultimate moments The Spiral shifts into a Choose Your Own adventure style, circuitous narrative.
The reader is dazzled with the illusion of control. Seemingly we hold both Erma and Sero’s fates in our hands.
This is the fun and the fascination of The Spiral. By giving us control, the story is seeking to challenge our assumption about what control even means.
I think more than a few readers will be unsettled by their own presumption of sitting above the narrative. That it’s some sort of entertainment that we can dip in and out of.
The Spiral also explores the exercise of control in our own world. Power and its uses to control are at the centre of our public consciousness at the moment. While it would be too much to say that The Spiral is talking directly to this moment, it offers some perspectives on how control operates, particularly against women.
The Spiral is taut and thrilling. It is experimental and baffling. It is an absolute gripping read and I highly recommend it.
