The Marsh Birds

An Iraqi boy undergoes a harrowing series of trials in Sallis's fifth novel, a harsh but only partially convincing indictment of the author's native Australia's indifference to political refugees. Twelve-year-old Dhurgham, whose well-to-do father runs afoul of the Hussein regime, gets separated from his family while fleeing Iraq and waits for them for weeks at the Great Mosque in Damascus. Eventually, he is taken in by a Syrian man named Hosni, a pedophile who steals Dhurgham's money and forces the boy into an increasingly abusive relationship that lasts five years, until Hosni fears "the threat of Dhurgham's manhood disrupting everything." Hosni sends Dhurgham to Australia, where he is placed in the Mawirrigun detention camp with hundreds of other Muslim refugees. Dhurgham, now 17 and with his refugee status in limbo, vacillates between violence and depression, ultimately launching a hunger strike that gets him transferred to New Zealand. There, he attempts to rejoin society, but the cultural differences may be too great to overcome. Sallis is well known in Australia for her politically charged fiction (Mahjar and The City of Sealions also deal with the intersection of Australia and the Middle East), but she overplays her hand, creating a portrait that is sympathetic but without much nuance. (Oct.)