The Company of the Dead by David Kowalski . . . Posted 22 February, 2009

The Company of the Dead by David Kowalski Pan Macmillan Australia Reviewed by Dirk Flinthart Book reviews index

    Sometimes - oh so rarely - a new writer enters the scene with a novel so strong and fine and vivid that the rest of us are left breathless, able to do little more than applaud from the sidelines. The Aurealis Awards honoured David Kowalski recently for his first novel, The Company of the Dead, and all I wish to do here is lead the applause.

    Lets get the preliminaries over first. The Company of the Dead is an enormous novel, more than seven hundred pages in trade paperback issue. It's a classic multiple worlds/time travel tale, beautifully folded and twisted to offer an eminently satisfying conclusion despite the length of the beast. In fact, right there is the first point where Kowalski has distinguished himself: unlike most other seven-hundred-page monsters of recent fiction, The Company of the Dead is a pacy, involving, hard-driving story full of action, derring-do, desperation, and even heroism. It is, to sum up, a cracking good read.

    There's little room for criticism here. Perhaps Kowalski has a tendency to write shortish chapters which can get a little irksome over seven-hundred-plus pages. But that's a minor stylistic quibble, not even worth noticing. Kowalski is a storyteller, not a stylist. He's got a fine turn of phrase and his descriptions and settings are more than adequate to the job, but it's the characters and the pace and the complexity and the depth of the story itself that will pick you up, carry you away, and keep you turning pages to the very last.

    Kowalskis characters work beautifully. They are vividly drawn, and though the temptation to use the time-travel-writer's favourite device and recreate historical figures must have been strong, Kowalski has resisted, creating his own pantheon of plausible, engrossing people. Of course, he hasn't ignored history entirely. His use of a fictional member of the tragic, heroic Kennedy family of the USA is genuinely brilliant. Joseph Robard Kennedy, a cousin-who-never-was to JFK himself, is a salutory tribute to everything that has been both best and worst in that iconic clan. He works as a tragic and heroic central figure around which events unfold and align themselves, through which enormous, half-seen historical forces play themselves out.

    The alternate universe Kowalski postulates - one which is brought about by well-intentioned but poorly-considered interference in the timeline - is well-constructed, and intriguing enough in its own right. If there was no American intervention to end World War 1, suggests Kowalski, our world would gradually be swallowed by slowly expanding German and Japanese spheres of influence, under the old Imperial structure. It makes an interesting backdrop against which the events of the tale play out.

    And beyond that, what should I tell you? That the dialogue is sharp and effective, the pace is good, the storyline marvellously consistent throughout its twists and turns. That there is enough science to keep the hardcore readers happy, and enough action and warfare to keep the mil-fic readers happy, and enough of a sense of destiny and mystery and even mysticism to intrigue many fantasy readers across the border into new territory.

    There's more to tell, but so much the better that I should leave the book to speak for itself. I can't remember the last time a novel this size kept me eagerly turning pages to the very end. This is a great debut. This novel thoroughly deserved the Aurealis nod, and if it doesn't pick up a few more awards on its way I'll be extremely disappointed. You owe it to yourself to pick up a copy at your earliest opportunity, so that you, too, can find out what all the applause is for.

Reviewed by Dirk Flinthart