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Waypoints
In 1910 the famed escapologist Harry Houdini made an ill-fated attempt to become the first person to fly an aircraft over Australian soil—yet while Houdini is remembered today for his failure, the true record-holder has been forgotten. This quirk of history becomes the focus for the obsessions of Bernard Cripp, world-weary scion of an ailing family circus, who tries to unearth every detail of Houdini’s flight in order to re-enact it. But why is Bernard so single-minded? As his manic testimony unspools, his story takes on a darker tone: he is, in fact, in mourning for a wife and child he has lost to the skies, and paralysed by the uncertainty surrounding their deaths. If his efforts to re-create history cannot bring back his loved ones, can they at least bring him peace as he struggles to live with his loss?
In Waypoints, his outlandish début novel, Adam Ouston embarks on a journey to reclaim a lost sense of awe and wonder from subjects as diverse as Victorian vaudeville and cutting-edge data storage, from the early history of Alzheimer’s disease to the immortality of human consciousness. Blending the solemnity of Sebald with the breathlessness of Bernhard, the result is equal parts rambunctious and ruminative, poignant and hilarious — a wild ride through a storm of grief, ambition, integrity, remembrance, and love.
'Artful, terrific, heaps of fun... Adam Ouston is hugely talented.' – Robbie Arnott
In Waypoints, his outlandish début novel, Adam Ouston embarks on a journey to reclaim a lost sense of awe and wonder from subjects as diverse as Victorian vaudeville and cutting-edge data storage, from the early history of Alzheimer’s disease to the immortality of human consciousness. Blending the solemnity of Sebald with the breathlessness of Bernhard, the result is equal parts rambunctious and ruminative, poignant and hilarious — a wild ride through a storm of grief, ambition, integrity, remembrance, and love.
'Artful, terrific, heaps of fun... Adam Ouston is hugely talented.' – Robbie Arnott
192 pages, Paperback
First published March 1, 2022
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Displaying 1 - 18 of 18 reviews
August 29, 2022
Waypoints is about a lot of things but its central focus is on the disconnect between the accumulation of information and the ability to ascertain truth. Much of the narrative focuses on the 2014 disappearance of Malaysian Airlines Flight 370. As commentators have noted, the disappearance of MH370 has given rise to a host of conspiracy theories, partly due to the cryptic public comments of the Malaysian authorities and partly due to the voluminous information available to the public. Armed with such information, how does one construct a narrative? Ouston employs a Bernhardian narrator here, a choice that seems questionable at first - but one that ultimately pays off, particularly once the novel gains momentum after page 50 or so. This is certainly a book that gets better as it goes along. Even after I finished, I found myself dipping back into the narrative to read favorite passages again. The complex prose rewards a second read.
June 8, 2023
Waypoint - A specified geographical location used to define an area navigation route or the flight path of an aircraft employing area navigation.
Definition from the Safety Investigation Report MH370/01/2018 from the Malaysian ICAO Annex 13 Safety Investigation Team
Waypoints by Adam Ouston is published by This is Splice.
Before reading the novel I listened to the author on the Beyond the Zero podcast (see below for a list of his favourite novels) which made me very excited to read the novel, and it was very bit as good as I expected. This is a Sebaldian novel for the age of Wikipedia, written by a Bernard-like manically obsessively circular narrator, in lengthy sentences and one unbroken paragraph, except without the misanthropy (wonderfully the very last character in the novel is a "curmudgeonly" Austrian), and with a distinctive voice of Ouston's own.
The novel embraces a host of themes including Harry Houdini, the death of vaudeville, the birth of the aviation age, Alzheimer's disease, the disappearance of MH370, the successive impact of movies, televisions and the internet on live acts, and the implications of our information age where in theory all knowledge is at our finger tips, and yet fake news is spreading and mysteries remain
It is narrated by Bernard Cripp, now the third generation proprietor of Cripp's Circus, and and a fire-eater in his own right. As he tells us of the circus's history:
I know it sounds bizarre to say, but it was welcome news, even though “welcome” is not quite the right word; in any case, it got me out of the house, out from in front of my computer, out of my seemingly interminable death scrolls, and back to work as a fire performer in Cripp’s Circus, which had been touring Australia (and at one point the world) since 1931 — my father, Arthur Keith Cripp, was a WWII orphan who’d been sent to the circus at the age of seven, in 1949, and had become successful at sleight of hand and wrangling big cats before taking over the enterprise when his adoptive parents retired in 1966, whereafter he married the clairvoyant Marigold Hobsbawm and continued touring the country eleven months of every year as owner and proprietor — but was now on the brink of collapse, as it had been at the advent of television (an event that sent my father’s adoptive parents into retirement but only made him more focused on success), the only difference being that now my father was no longer as capable of reinventing the show as he had been then.
The "welcome" news was that debris from Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 had been founded, at least ending any lingering false hopes that the passengers had survived, as Bernard Cripp's wife (a trapeze artist) and daughter were two of those on board the vanished plane. Although the mystery of the plane's disappearance, the way it "pulled a Houdini", is unsolved, and Cripp points out the phrase is in any case unjustified:
... to use the name Houdini to refer to a disappearing or vanishing act is misleading, for that was not what he did, that was only half the story; he returned; he came back, he escaped death, outwitted oblivion, and so when some commentator or other made the offhand and particularly hurtful remark that MH370 had “pulled a Houdini,” it was clear that they did not know what they were talking about, because if it had pulled a Houdini, which was what we were all praying for, it would have reappeared, it would have come back to us, Alison and Beatrice would have returned home, but that’s not what happened because in reality after making its Immelmann-like turn towards the Indian Ocean followed by a couple of additional minor turns, it dropped off all radar and vanished without a trace, without a signal, without a call for help, a mayday, nothing, gone forever, Jonah swallowed by the whale and never making it out — of all the crazy theories, I’m yet to come across one arguing for the Leviathan, though doubtless it’s out there — vanished like the poor wife of the great promotor, vaudeville proprietor, comic baritone and theatre owner Harry Rickards, Kate Rickards (“Katie Angel” as she was known during her trapeze artist years, who soared against the blue, red and yellow of the bigtop and captured the hearts and minds not only of the audience, but of old Henry Leete, Harry Rickards, who must have stood agog at the Flying Woman and said to himself, “Yes, that’s the woman of my heart,” I know the feeling, Harry, I know it well, for I too have stood as you did, arms slack by my sides, gazing up at my own Flying Woman, though Alison went by The Amazing Aerialist Antoinette)
In 1909-10, the promoter Harry Rickards, then based in Australia, arranged "at enormous expense" as his publicity poster (an image of it can be found here) for Harry Houdini to come to Australia, and become the first person to achieve powered, controlled flight on the continent. But as the narrator tells us in the passage that opens the novel, many believe Houdini was not first, but then no one person is definitively identified as having beaten him:
It’s bizarre because now, in our age of information, when any fact, datum or titbit is literally at our fingertips, and the price for being deemed wrong grows mightier by the day; when any idle curiosity or bagatelle can be satisfied in an instant, invariably leading to further idle curiosities and bagatelles, taking you deeper into the goldmine of a seemingly limitless supply; when it’s more or less understandable that, for most of us, there really is no excuse for not knowing anything, it’s all there, all you have to do is look it up; now, in an age when the sweep of history is laid out before us, notwithstanding all the caveats, hesitations and conflicting perspectives, of those who know about the airborne exploits of the Great Harry Houdini — illusionist, self-promoter, dispeller of frauds and inveterate daredevil — more people seem to know that the Master of Mystery didn’t actually get the record for the first controlled flight of a powered aircraft in Australia than know who in fact did. The suggestion that the Handcuff King had been beaten to the punch came as a surprise to me, but the more I looked into the matter, the more I found that the record held by the cunning escapologist had become disputed, qualified and sometimes even dismissed outright, given all the fuss over aviation at the dawn of human flight, records being attempted and broken, new heights being reached, both literally and metaphorically — really, the world at the time was so taken by all things aircraft-related that many newspapers had sections headed ‘Flight’ to discuss of global air events; who went up where and in what, which awards were on offer and with what prize money — indeed, there was so much wonder surrounding aviation, and people were so awestruck at seeing their fellow humans take to the skies, and the hype was so intense, that it is conceivable that official records do not quite match the events as they really transpired; which is why there is some conjecture from certain quarters surrounding Houdini’s attempt to soar over Australian soil, the curious upshot being that while it might be common knowledge that the great mystifier held the record (or holds it still, depending on who you ask) the very fact that it is disputed seems to be the fact worth knowing, maybe because it implies greater familiarity with the subject, which in turn suggests that the more valuable fact regarding Houdini’s flight on 18 March 1910 at Diggers Rest in Victoria, just north of Melbourne, coincidentally near the present-day Tullamarine Airport, isn’t what something is but rather what something isn’t.
(see this article on the Wild About Harry blog for more detail of Houdini's feat and the disputes around who else might have been first)
Cripp ventures down a research rabbithole, determined that the truth of MH370 must lie somewhere in the vast amounts of data available in the world even if the significance of the data is unrecognised (just as parts of MH370's flight path later became known from Malaysian military radar), seemingly leaning towards the 'death by pilot suicide' theory, based on the investigation report that found that's the Captain's home flight simulator had "seven 'manually programmed' waypoint coordinates that, when connected together, will create a flight path from KLIA to an area south of the Indian Ocean through the Andaman Sea."
But his life, and the circus's survival, is also impacted by his father's health, as the latter suffers from Alzheimer's, leading Cripp down another rabbithole in to the origins of the condition and the first person diagnosed with ut:
This last was something Auguste Deter repeated over and again: "I last have lost myself" (Ich habe mich verloren), sometimes screaming it and disturbing everyone on the ward, other times sitting alone muttering to herself, which suggests, like a plane crash unfolding that she was aware of her degenerating mind, there was a part of her that understood that she was in a downward spiral, a process in which the waypoints of her life were disappearing one after the other,..
And Cripp decides on a new, more practical, obsession - an attempt to replicate Houdini's successful first (or rather second?) controlled powered flight in Australia down to every last detail.
A brilliant novel of which this review only scratches the surface - highly recommended.
Adam Ouston's Top Shelf 10 books from the Beyond the Zero podcast
All Fires the Fire - Julio Cortazar
By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept - Elizabeth Smart
Mrs Dalloway - Virginia Woolf
Jeanette Winterson - The Passion
Thomas Bernhard - The Looser
The Melancholy of Resistance - László Krasznahorkai
Dublinesque - Enrique Villa-Matas
The Vegetarian - Han King
By Night in Chile - Roberto Bolano
Max Sebald - Vertigo
Definition from the Safety Investigation Report MH370/01/2018 from the Malaysian ICAO Annex 13 Safety Investigation Team
Waypoints by Adam Ouston is published by This is Splice.
Before reading the novel I listened to the author on the Beyond the Zero podcast (see below for a list of his favourite novels) which made me very excited to read the novel, and it was very bit as good as I expected. This is a Sebaldian novel for the age of Wikipedia, written by a Bernard-like manically obsessively circular narrator, in lengthy sentences and one unbroken paragraph, except without the misanthropy (wonderfully the very last character in the novel is a "curmudgeonly" Austrian), and with a distinctive voice of Ouston's own.
The novel embraces a host of themes including Harry Houdini, the death of vaudeville, the birth of the aviation age, Alzheimer's disease, the disappearance of MH370, the successive impact of movies, televisions and the internet on live acts, and the implications of our information age where in theory all knowledge is at our finger tips, and yet fake news is spreading and mysteries remain
It is narrated by Bernard Cripp, now the third generation proprietor of Cripp's Circus, and and a fire-eater in his own right. As he tells us of the circus's history:
I know it sounds bizarre to say, but it was welcome news, even though “welcome” is not quite the right word; in any case, it got me out of the house, out from in front of my computer, out of my seemingly interminable death scrolls, and back to work as a fire performer in Cripp’s Circus, which had been touring Australia (and at one point the world) since 1931 — my father, Arthur Keith Cripp, was a WWII orphan who’d been sent to the circus at the age of seven, in 1949, and had become successful at sleight of hand and wrangling big cats before taking over the enterprise when his adoptive parents retired in 1966, whereafter he married the clairvoyant Marigold Hobsbawm and continued touring the country eleven months of every year as owner and proprietor — but was now on the brink of collapse, as it had been at the advent of television (an event that sent my father’s adoptive parents into retirement but only made him more focused on success), the only difference being that now my father was no longer as capable of reinventing the show as he had been then.
The "welcome" news was that debris from Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 had been founded, at least ending any lingering false hopes that the passengers had survived, as Bernard Cripp's wife (a trapeze artist) and daughter were two of those on board the vanished plane. Although the mystery of the plane's disappearance, the way it "pulled a Houdini", is unsolved, and Cripp points out the phrase is in any case unjustified:
... to use the name Houdini to refer to a disappearing or vanishing act is misleading, for that was not what he did, that was only half the story; he returned; he came back, he escaped death, outwitted oblivion, and so when some commentator or other made the offhand and particularly hurtful remark that MH370 had “pulled a Houdini,” it was clear that they did not know what they were talking about, because if it had pulled a Houdini, which was what we were all praying for, it would have reappeared, it would have come back to us, Alison and Beatrice would have returned home, but that’s not what happened because in reality after making its Immelmann-like turn towards the Indian Ocean followed by a couple of additional minor turns, it dropped off all radar and vanished without a trace, without a signal, without a call for help, a mayday, nothing, gone forever, Jonah swallowed by the whale and never making it out — of all the crazy theories, I’m yet to come across one arguing for the Leviathan, though doubtless it’s out there — vanished like the poor wife of the great promotor, vaudeville proprietor, comic baritone and theatre owner Harry Rickards, Kate Rickards (“Katie Angel” as she was known during her trapeze artist years, who soared against the blue, red and yellow of the bigtop and captured the hearts and minds not only of the audience, but of old Henry Leete, Harry Rickards, who must have stood agog at the Flying Woman and said to himself, “Yes, that’s the woman of my heart,” I know the feeling, Harry, I know it well, for I too have stood as you did, arms slack by my sides, gazing up at my own Flying Woman, though Alison went by The Amazing Aerialist Antoinette)
In 1909-10, the promoter Harry Rickards, then based in Australia, arranged "at enormous expense" as his publicity poster (an image of it can be found here) for Harry Houdini to come to Australia, and become the first person to achieve powered, controlled flight on the continent. But as the narrator tells us in the passage that opens the novel, many believe Houdini was not first, but then no one person is definitively identified as having beaten him:
It’s bizarre because now, in our age of information, when any fact, datum or titbit is literally at our fingertips, and the price for being deemed wrong grows mightier by the day; when any idle curiosity or bagatelle can be satisfied in an instant, invariably leading to further idle curiosities and bagatelles, taking you deeper into the goldmine of a seemingly limitless supply; when it’s more or less understandable that, for most of us, there really is no excuse for not knowing anything, it’s all there, all you have to do is look it up; now, in an age when the sweep of history is laid out before us, notwithstanding all the caveats, hesitations and conflicting perspectives, of those who know about the airborne exploits of the Great Harry Houdini — illusionist, self-promoter, dispeller of frauds and inveterate daredevil — more people seem to know that the Master of Mystery didn’t actually get the record for the first controlled flight of a powered aircraft in Australia than know who in fact did. The suggestion that the Handcuff King had been beaten to the punch came as a surprise to me, but the more I looked into the matter, the more I found that the record held by the cunning escapologist had become disputed, qualified and sometimes even dismissed outright, given all the fuss over aviation at the dawn of human flight, records being attempted and broken, new heights being reached, both literally and metaphorically — really, the world at the time was so taken by all things aircraft-related that many newspapers had sections headed ‘Flight’ to discuss of global air events; who went up where and in what, which awards were on offer and with what prize money — indeed, there was so much wonder surrounding aviation, and people were so awestruck at seeing their fellow humans take to the skies, and the hype was so intense, that it is conceivable that official records do not quite match the events as they really transpired; which is why there is some conjecture from certain quarters surrounding Houdini’s attempt to soar over Australian soil, the curious upshot being that while it might be common knowledge that the great mystifier held the record (or holds it still, depending on who you ask) the very fact that it is disputed seems to be the fact worth knowing, maybe because it implies greater familiarity with the subject, which in turn suggests that the more valuable fact regarding Houdini’s flight on 18 March 1910 at Diggers Rest in Victoria, just north of Melbourne, coincidentally near the present-day Tullamarine Airport, isn’t what something is but rather what something isn’t.
(see this article on the Wild About Harry blog for more detail of Houdini's feat and the disputes around who else might have been first)
Cripp ventures down a research rabbithole, determined that the truth of MH370 must lie somewhere in the vast amounts of data available in the world even if the significance of the data is unrecognised (just as parts of MH370's flight path later became known from Malaysian military radar), seemingly leaning towards the 'death by pilot suicide' theory, based on the investigation report that found that's the Captain's home flight simulator had "seven 'manually programmed' waypoint coordinates that, when connected together, will create a flight path from KLIA to an area south of the Indian Ocean through the Andaman Sea."
But his life, and the circus's survival, is also impacted by his father's health, as the latter suffers from Alzheimer's, leading Cripp down another rabbithole in to the origins of the condition and the first person diagnosed with ut:
This last was something Auguste Deter repeated over and again: "I last have lost myself" (Ich habe mich verloren), sometimes screaming it and disturbing everyone on the ward, other times sitting alone muttering to herself, which suggests, like a plane crash unfolding that she was aware of her degenerating mind, there was a part of her that understood that she was in a downward spiral, a process in which the waypoints of her life were disappearing one after the other,..
And Cripp decides on a new, more practical, obsession - an attempt to replicate Houdini's successful first (or rather second?) controlled powered flight in Australia down to every last detail.
A brilliant novel of which this review only scratches the surface - highly recommended.
Adam Ouston's Top Shelf 10 books from the Beyond the Zero podcast
All Fires the Fire - Julio Cortazar
By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept - Elizabeth Smart
Mrs Dalloway - Virginia Woolf
Jeanette Winterson - The Passion
Thomas Bernhard - The Looser
The Melancholy of Resistance - László Krasznahorkai
Dublinesque - Enrique Villa-Matas
The Vegetarian - Han King
By Night in Chile - Roberto Bolano
Max Sebald - Vertigo
May 14, 2022
Entertaining read if you enjoy a bernhadian narrator (albeit more optimistic about life) with a sebaldian obsession for seemly random but interconnected themes.
I was specially struck by his reflections on the suffering of those that die in plane crashes - while being terrifying, it actually made me less afraid of being involved in a flight accident.
I was specially struck by his reflections on the suffering of those that die in plane crashes - while being terrifying, it actually made me less afraid of being involved in a flight accident.
Read
March 7, 2022A meditation on time, mortality, technology, the future and the great unknown — not to mention "weather patterns, ocean currents, winds, wear rates on aircraft parts, responses to trauma, instances of adultery in the relationships of pilots, radio waves, satellite imagery, radicalisation, UFOs, ocean birds, whale song frequencies, the NASDAQ" — it combines the picaresque quality of Peter Carey's Illywhacker with the inquisitiveness of Aldous Huxley and the rhythms of a twinkly, whimsical Thomas Bernhard. Yet Ouston has his own style, taking circumspect precision, combining it with due fondness for the em dash, and then, like Lil Nas X with a bad case of logorrhea, riding until he can't no more.
Read on: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-03-0...
Read on: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-03-0...
May 18, 2022
Reviewed this for The Collidescope, read here: https://thecollidescope.com/2022/05/1...
March 21, 2022
This is a fascinating novel. It took me a while to get into it, but once accustomed to the voice it was like getting pulled along by a strong current. Ouston has imagined the manic desperation of someone trying to navigate the horror of losing their wife and child on flight MH370. Along with the obsessive pursuit of replicating a flight by Harry Houdini, the narrator explores a dizzying array of topics tangential to flight and information recall. I heard the novel described as Wikipedian, which is a good description of the endless digressions possible when reading those entries; but Ouston’s digressions, though wild and unpredictable at times, always seem to circle back smoothly to the main narrative. I thought the most powerful part of the book was the clinical dissection of available information about MH370’s last flight and of its captain. I was disappointed with the novel’s ending, but upon reflection it seems true to a story that tries to paint an honest picture of how life sweeps along through unclear waypoints and lacks any final destination.
May 21, 2023
Wow - simply breathtaking. One long stream of consciousness ramble by a delightfully quirky narrator. Literally hard to put down because it doesn't have traditional chapter breaks or even paragraph breaks. I loved the concept & the story really engaged me. Don't be misled by the books length - you cannot read this quickly & it feels like a "normal" 300 page length. Brilliant. I may be marking a bit harshly on this, but I marked it down to 4 stars as I found sections of it a little repetitive & tedious.
March 30, 2023
Waypoints is an intriguing work of fiction that will appeal to readers who are comfortable with having a delayed understanding of what's going on in the text. If you're ok with reading what seems to be randomness (but isn't) you will enjoy Waypoints, even if — like me — you have to read and re-read and re-read again and again to join the dots, and then discover that the author has been playing games and sucked you into tracking something that was established as trivial at the outset.
Instead of focussing on what's important.
Let me try to explain.
The novel begins with a narrator eventually revealed to be Arthur Bernard Cripps who is obsessed with Harry Houdini's attempt on an aviation record at Diggers' Rest Victoria in 1910. Cripps is indignant that people are so keen to know 'facts', which are often not important, or are distorted, or not even true, when they don't know what they ought to know. Specifically he can't get over the way that many more people know about the celebrity who failed to set an aviation record rather than know about the person who succeeded.
Ouston — in this narrative of a single paragraph over 172 pages that begins with a sentence half a page long, which is followed by another twice its length — has Cripps lure the reader into reading all about Houdini at Diggers' Rest, and his promoter Harry Rickards, and about HR's wife who was a trapeze artist, and — almost as an afterthought — he mentions his own wife who was also a trapeze artist. Ouston's narrator is mimicking the way those who are obsessed with celebrity know all about whoever it is, almost as if they are part of the family.
He rambles on about other aviators, and their tragic ends, and how some were lost at sea, and we learn that he has 'lost' his father to Alzheimer's disease, and that he has a project underway to recreate the Houdini flight because he wants to go back in time as if in a time machine to recreate the Age of Awe.
(I won't have been the only reader to read and re-read, back from page 21, and then back again from page 43, to see if I had missed the name of the person who achieved the aviation record that Houdini was aiming for but failed.)
And then, well after the enigmatic insertion which I underlined in the excerpt above, Cripps tells us that his wife, Alison and his daughter Beatrice vanished without a trace when Malaysian Airlines Flight MH370 disappeared en route between Kuala Lumpur and Beijing. This narrator is a man drowning in grief.
How can it be, in an age when everything is tracked, traced, photographed, recorded and stored in the cloud, that there are no answers to the mysterious disappearance of Malaysian Airlines Flight MH370?
To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2023/03/31/w...
Instead of focussing on what's important.
Let me try to explain.
The novel begins with a narrator eventually revealed to be Arthur Bernard Cripps who is obsessed with Harry Houdini's attempt on an aviation record at Diggers' Rest Victoria in 1910. Cripps is indignant that people are so keen to know 'facts', which are often not important, or are distorted, or not even true, when they don't know what they ought to know. Specifically he can't get over the way that many more people know about the celebrity who failed to set an aviation record rather than know about the person who succeeded.
So it's weird that the bankable fact that has come down through the ages, or rather the decades, over a century later, when getting on a plane costs much less than £200 and the only time aircraft appear in the media is when they are not in the sky — as I now know only too well — is not the same fact that was so bankable in 1910, is not that Harry Houdini was first, but that Harry Houdini was not first... (p.12, underlining mine.)
Ouston — in this narrative of a single paragraph over 172 pages that begins with a sentence half a page long, which is followed by another twice its length — has Cripps lure the reader into reading all about Houdini at Diggers' Rest, and his promoter Harry Rickards, and about HR's wife who was a trapeze artist, and — almost as an afterthought — he mentions his own wife who was also a trapeze artist. Ouston's narrator is mimicking the way those who are obsessed with celebrity know all about whoever it is, almost as if they are part of the family.
He rambles on about other aviators, and their tragic ends, and how some were lost at sea, and we learn that he has 'lost' his father to Alzheimer's disease, and that he has a project underway to recreate the Houdini flight because he wants to go back in time as if in a time machine to recreate the Age of Awe.
(I won't have been the only reader to read and re-read, back from page 21, and then back again from page 43, to see if I had missed the name of the person who achieved the aviation record that Houdini was aiming for but failed.)
And then, well after the enigmatic insertion which I underlined in the excerpt above, Cripps tells us that his wife, Alison and his daughter Beatrice vanished without a trace when Malaysian Airlines Flight MH370 disappeared en route between Kuala Lumpur and Beijing. This narrator is a man drowning in grief.
How can it be, in an age when everything is tracked, traced, photographed, recorded and stored in the cloud, that there are no answers to the mysterious disappearance of Malaysian Airlines Flight MH370?
To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2023/03/31/w...
February 16, 2022
Dense and beautiful, invoking memory and myth. Touches of Drndić, Bernhard (without the bitterness) and Murnane, Waypoints seems destined for classic status.
July 14, 2023
Waypoints begins with a perhaps startling fact: that the escapologist Harry Houdini became the second person to make a controlled powered flight in Australia, when he circled a paddock for over two minutes at Digger’s Rest north of Melbourne in 1910. Who was the first, you might wonder? Never mind who: Waypoints teases but insists it’s more important that we know Houdini wasn’t first; this novel “isn’t what something is but rather what something isn’t”. Read more on my blog.
July 21, 2023
‘… yes, it is all there in that immense cloud of knowing…’
I started reading this. I put it down. I picked it up, and at about the thirty-page mark I was intrigued enough to continue. I thank Lisa’s review for this. But let’s start with the book blurb:
‘In 1910 the famed escapologist Harry Houdini made an ill-fated attempt to become the first person to fly an aircraft over Australian soil—yet while Houdini is remembered today for his failure, the true record-holder has been forgotten. This quirk of history becomes the focus for the obsessions of Bernard Cripp, world-weary scion of an ailing family circus, who tries to unearth every detail of Houdini’s flight in order to re-enact it. But why is Bernard so single-minded? As his manic testimony unspools, his story takes on a darker tone: he is, in fact, in mourning for a wife and child he has lost to the skies, and paralysed by the uncertainty surrounding their deaths. If his efforts to re-create history cannot bring back his loved ones, can they at least bring him peace as he struggles to live with his loss?’
Bernard’s research, which he calls his ‘my attempt at an attempt of his attempt’ possibly tells the reader all they need to know about how the story will unfold. It is a wild (but progressively less confusing) ride through ambition and grief, through love and remembrance. At the same time, knowing that Houdini was not the first person to make a controlled powered flight over Australia (at Digger’s Rest north of Melbourne in 1910) might lead you to wonder who as the first? Not important: this novel ‘isn’t what something is but rather what something isn’t.’ And so, we follow Arthur Bernard Cripp on his journey. We learn that he is the latest in a line of circus owners and we learn why he is obsessed with the recreation of Houdini’s flight.
But it isn’t just the planned flight which captures the reader’s attention, it is the myriad of facts and ideas that Cripp shares as he traverses a world made both more accessible and more dangerous by the information age. More dangerous? Cripp lost his wife and daughter on flight MH370.
Progress has a dark side as well as failures.
Intriguing.
Jennifer Cameron-Smith
I started reading this. I put it down. I picked it up, and at about the thirty-page mark I was intrigued enough to continue. I thank Lisa’s review for this. But let’s start with the book blurb:
‘In 1910 the famed escapologist Harry Houdini made an ill-fated attempt to become the first person to fly an aircraft over Australian soil—yet while Houdini is remembered today for his failure, the true record-holder has been forgotten. This quirk of history becomes the focus for the obsessions of Bernard Cripp, world-weary scion of an ailing family circus, who tries to unearth every detail of Houdini’s flight in order to re-enact it. But why is Bernard so single-minded? As his manic testimony unspools, his story takes on a darker tone: he is, in fact, in mourning for a wife and child he has lost to the skies, and paralysed by the uncertainty surrounding their deaths. If his efforts to re-create history cannot bring back his loved ones, can they at least bring him peace as he struggles to live with his loss?’
Bernard’s research, which he calls his ‘my attempt at an attempt of his attempt’ possibly tells the reader all they need to know about how the story will unfold. It is a wild (but progressively less confusing) ride through ambition and grief, through love and remembrance. At the same time, knowing that Houdini was not the first person to make a controlled powered flight over Australia (at Digger’s Rest north of Melbourne in 1910) might lead you to wonder who as the first? Not important: this novel ‘isn’t what something is but rather what something isn’t.’ And so, we follow Arthur Bernard Cripp on his journey. We learn that he is the latest in a line of circus owners and we learn why he is obsessed with the recreation of Houdini’s flight.
But it isn’t just the planned flight which captures the reader’s attention, it is the myriad of facts and ideas that Cripp shares as he traverses a world made both more accessible and more dangerous by the information age. More dangerous? Cripp lost his wife and daughter on flight MH370.
Progress has a dark side as well as failures.
Intriguing.
Jennifer Cameron-Smith
October 3, 2025
We’re All Lost in The Sea of Information
A few Australian authors lately have worked with interesting narrative possibilities and come up with imaginative and new ways to interrogate our world. Gerald Murnane is an old hand at innovative narrative. Less know is Jen Craig whose Wall and the earlier and exceptional Panthers and Museum of Fire really cut loose and impressed me and others on here. Much less so, Grimmish by Michael Winkler, whose boxer non-fiction-fiction-fable loses control of its aims very quickly. (But it does connect strangely to this book as it tackles a peculiar element of the live interactive drama of performance, the sense of awe and wonder offered to an audience when watching a man being pummelled to within an inch of his life as performance, boxing ostensibly, while standing firm and taking it.)
But this is about Waypoints.
The idea of the live performance, the sense of awe and wonder connects strangely to one of Waypoints’ recurring motifs about the live experience. Waypoints uses the 1910 visit to Australia by the great escapologist, Harry Houdini (Hungarian immigrant to USA), who as he hit his mid 30s increasingly looked for new ways to stimulate his audience. In an eerie connection, Joe Grim, the pain insensitive boxer came out touring Australia in 1913 from America and before that as an immigrant to the US from Italy. Escapology, whether underwater, in cages, or locked up inside a giant tortoise (yes and it was rotting, too) was getting tougher as the years dragged on. So this new phenomenon of flight took Houdini’s fancy and he bought himself a Voisin box airplane – basically a motorised bicycle with a rudder and two box kites for wings – and went around the world exhibiting the new-fangled idea of controlled flight. He got a gig here in Australia when an entrepreneur paid him a retainer to make the first controlled flight in Australia. There was money to be made and at the time, Australia was still the richest place in the world, per capita.
There are endless connections to be made between the elements here, and it’s fun and thought-provoking at the same time. Around 30 kilometres north of where I’m writing this – as the crow flies - at a place called Diggers Rest, a paddock was chosen for this flight. There’s a plaque, too.
“A waypoint is an intermediate point or place on a route or line of travel, a stopping point or point at which course is changed” According to Wikipedia
The author, Adam Ouston, writes about a scenario we all know and live with every day – the idea that all human knowledge is available to us, for many at our fingertips, and we also have or will soon have collected all human experience as well and stored it in vast databanks. Nothing should surprise us, nothing should cause us awe or wonder, nothing is live and surprising. We can look up the answer. (Of course, all human experience by this measure starts when the Internet started collecting itself in the mid 1990s)
Ouston writes in a familiar narrative form to those who know WG Sebald and especially Rings of Saturn. A narrator in a particular state of morbid mind embarks on a journey, and everything then circles that emotional orbit. In that state, the narrator absorbs and conveys knowledge, information about the world around him, facts, events, theories, reports etc to craft a fictional narrative from those bits and pieces of knowledge and absorbable facts.
Ouston takes as his subject the still inexplicable loss of the Malaysian airline flight MH370 that disappeared back on March 8 2014. Note the date is close to the calendar date of Houdini’s flight on March 18, 1910. The disappearance is significant to the narrator because his wife and daughter were on the flight and the story becomes the grief-obsessed husband-father’s pre-occupation with information about the flight, its whereabouts, anything the information rich ecology we live under can offer him so he can either know they are gone, or hope they might return.
We interact with information online in a kind of flow, we barely realise once we start where we end up. The narrative structure is like this, too. No paragraphs, long, long, multi-clausal sentences that take in as much as can be borne in a moment before it moves on, the segue is either clear or unclear, as are information connections. We rarely know the waypoints within these information flows, like the flight investigators trying to plot out events in the mystery of a disappearing passenger plane that stopped connecting to the global systems designed to track it early on and then, after a turn – a waypoint – simply disappeared.
Our narrator is a third-generation circus performer, the family circus is in decline, no one cares, there are so many other media available through which to extinguish our conscious time on earth. He knows full well the idea of how to engage an audience in a state of wonder – he sets himself alight, manages not to burn to death. Joe Grim stands taking punch after punch until his brain should implode, Harry Houdini risks death with every feat, early aviators barely had control of their kite planes and suffered the vagaries of wind and gravity, plummeting to their deaths. Excitement, thrill, awe, wonder juxtapose constantly with the deadening of our engagement with information piled on information, we don’t feel the blows, but also, we never feel the wonder. So, our narrator, in the midst of unreconcilable grief enlists a model plane enthusiast to build him an exact replica of the Voisin box plane Houdini used in 1910 outside Melbourne (my home all my life, btw) in order to replicate the flight - for whatever reason a grief-stricken recently unemployed circus performer, likely widower would have in such a cause – of Houdini’s earlier flight in the same place. The deadening effects of pain need fixing, I guess.
A couple of points, I scored the book 5 stars because it attempts something few do any more in preference for narrative safety – give readers a sense of awe and wonder at the narrative device married to the subject matter. It works most of the time, early on I think the rhythm stumbles, eventually the rhythm becomes controlled – think of a box kite plane on a windy day in 1910 – eventually becoming like the controlled passenger jet plane. Either that or I adapted to it and it flowed like those days in early March here in Melbourne, when the heat of the summer dissipates, the long still windless days of early autumn are the loveliest of all. Perfect days for launching a primitive box kite airplane. Anyway, not many try to write like this any more, preferring safety. We mostly get that all too common polished ordinariness of prose these days, a kind of monoculture has occurred in Australian writing. This didn’t make the Miles Franklin short list (our long-standing national literary prize) a real joke in my mind. But it exists, thank God. A risk-taking author that should be read around the world as an exponent of awe and wonder.
A few Australian authors lately have worked with interesting narrative possibilities and come up with imaginative and new ways to interrogate our world. Gerald Murnane is an old hand at innovative narrative. Less know is Jen Craig whose Wall and the earlier and exceptional Panthers and Museum of Fire really cut loose and impressed me and others on here. Much less so, Grimmish by Michael Winkler, whose boxer non-fiction-fiction-fable loses control of its aims very quickly. (But it does connect strangely to this book as it tackles a peculiar element of the live interactive drama of performance, the sense of awe and wonder offered to an audience when watching a man being pummelled to within an inch of his life as performance, boxing ostensibly, while standing firm and taking it.)
But this is about Waypoints.
The idea of the live performance, the sense of awe and wonder connects strangely to one of Waypoints’ recurring motifs about the live experience. Waypoints uses the 1910 visit to Australia by the great escapologist, Harry Houdini (Hungarian immigrant to USA), who as he hit his mid 30s increasingly looked for new ways to stimulate his audience. In an eerie connection, Joe Grim, the pain insensitive boxer came out touring Australia in 1913 from America and before that as an immigrant to the US from Italy. Escapology, whether underwater, in cages, or locked up inside a giant tortoise (yes and it was rotting, too) was getting tougher as the years dragged on. So this new phenomenon of flight took Houdini’s fancy and he bought himself a Voisin box airplane – basically a motorised bicycle with a rudder and two box kites for wings – and went around the world exhibiting the new-fangled idea of controlled flight. He got a gig here in Australia when an entrepreneur paid him a retainer to make the first controlled flight in Australia. There was money to be made and at the time, Australia was still the richest place in the world, per capita.
There are endless connections to be made between the elements here, and it’s fun and thought-provoking at the same time. Around 30 kilometres north of where I’m writing this – as the crow flies - at a place called Diggers Rest, a paddock was chosen for this flight. There’s a plaque, too.
“A waypoint is an intermediate point or place on a route or line of travel, a stopping point or point at which course is changed” According to Wikipedia
The author, Adam Ouston, writes about a scenario we all know and live with every day – the idea that all human knowledge is available to us, for many at our fingertips, and we also have or will soon have collected all human experience as well and stored it in vast databanks. Nothing should surprise us, nothing should cause us awe or wonder, nothing is live and surprising. We can look up the answer. (Of course, all human experience by this measure starts when the Internet started collecting itself in the mid 1990s)
Ouston writes in a familiar narrative form to those who know WG Sebald and especially Rings of Saturn. A narrator in a particular state of morbid mind embarks on a journey, and everything then circles that emotional orbit. In that state, the narrator absorbs and conveys knowledge, information about the world around him, facts, events, theories, reports etc to craft a fictional narrative from those bits and pieces of knowledge and absorbable facts.
Ouston takes as his subject the still inexplicable loss of the Malaysian airline flight MH370 that disappeared back on March 8 2014. Note the date is close to the calendar date of Houdini’s flight on March 18, 1910. The disappearance is significant to the narrator because his wife and daughter were on the flight and the story becomes the grief-obsessed husband-father’s pre-occupation with information about the flight, its whereabouts, anything the information rich ecology we live under can offer him so he can either know they are gone, or hope they might return.
We interact with information online in a kind of flow, we barely realise once we start where we end up. The narrative structure is like this, too. No paragraphs, long, long, multi-clausal sentences that take in as much as can be borne in a moment before it moves on, the segue is either clear or unclear, as are information connections. We rarely know the waypoints within these information flows, like the flight investigators trying to plot out events in the mystery of a disappearing passenger plane that stopped connecting to the global systems designed to track it early on and then, after a turn – a waypoint – simply disappeared.
Our narrator is a third-generation circus performer, the family circus is in decline, no one cares, there are so many other media available through which to extinguish our conscious time on earth. He knows full well the idea of how to engage an audience in a state of wonder – he sets himself alight, manages not to burn to death. Joe Grim stands taking punch after punch until his brain should implode, Harry Houdini risks death with every feat, early aviators barely had control of their kite planes and suffered the vagaries of wind and gravity, plummeting to their deaths. Excitement, thrill, awe, wonder juxtapose constantly with the deadening of our engagement with information piled on information, we don’t feel the blows, but also, we never feel the wonder. So, our narrator, in the midst of unreconcilable grief enlists a model plane enthusiast to build him an exact replica of the Voisin box plane Houdini used in 1910 outside Melbourne (my home all my life, btw) in order to replicate the flight - for whatever reason a grief-stricken recently unemployed circus performer, likely widower would have in such a cause – of Houdini’s earlier flight in the same place. The deadening effects of pain need fixing, I guess.
A couple of points, I scored the book 5 stars because it attempts something few do any more in preference for narrative safety – give readers a sense of awe and wonder at the narrative device married to the subject matter. It works most of the time, early on I think the rhythm stumbles, eventually the rhythm becomes controlled – think of a box kite plane on a windy day in 1910 – eventually becoming like the controlled passenger jet plane. Either that or I adapted to it and it flowed like those days in early March here in Melbourne, when the heat of the summer dissipates, the long still windless days of early autumn are the loveliest of all. Perfect days for launching a primitive box kite airplane. Anyway, not many try to write like this any more, preferring safety. We mostly get that all too common polished ordinariness of prose these days, a kind of monoculture has occurred in Australian writing. This didn’t make the Miles Franklin short list (our long-standing national literary prize) a real joke in my mind. But it exists, thank God. A risk-taking author that should be read around the world as an exponent of awe and wonder.
March 20, 2022
A brilliant novel, paradoxically both restless and mournful. The racing and eccentric style here orbits around the inescapable gravity of melancholy and mystery. In the narrator's eclectic segues, his obsessive-compulsive returns, his hurry, is a bizarre yet strangely moving performance of grief and the ceaseless searching for solace in the face of something intolerable. The style here is deliberately breathless (the novel has no paragraph breaks), but geared to 'captivate' with more than usual insistence--to keep you with its protagonist's unrelentingly whirlpool of thoughts. Yet the novel also draws you down into the most sadly gorgeous contemplations of loss and unknowing. An audacious performance -- lively, strange, and touching.
July 4, 2023
I only read ‘Waypoints’ because it was longlisted for the Miles Franklin prize. A very sharp and clever book however the repetition became tedious. That being said this is a book that covers a lot of ground or waypoints to be precise, (Houdini, MH370, Alzheimers, exploration) that all somehow seem to relate back to one another as we’re propelled forward. I can definitely understand why this piece of work was longlisted, at times I just didn’t feel smart enough to understand what it attempts to accomplish.
April 17, 2022
If you can, read this in one sitting. (Me, I'm too much of a fliberty gibert. I start a novel and keep it suspended over several days). In one sitting you will be better able to experience the unrelenting, obsessing drive of the narrator, and the spiraling structure (if that's what it is) where the story seems to go in circles, reviving old themes and subjects and collecting new ones up to the point in the story where he is "now". And "now" is now. It's us, here, now.
October 22, 2022
A hypnotic novel, unlike any I’ve read. Original, lyrical, and brilliant.
August 15, 2023
Ebook. Different style, almost no full-stops. It just keeps tearing along and takes you with it. Fantastic storyteller. Hilarious, tragic, much adventure. Pretty amazing for a first novel.
February 14, 2024
Ambitious and impressive, if not quite at the Bernhard level of obsessive monologue.
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