The Unknown Industrial Prisoner

Australian classic.

Dustjacket synopsis:

"In his 'preface' which comes near the end of this extraordinary novel David Ireland says:
'It has been my aim to take apart, then build up piece by piece this mosaic of one kind of human life...to remind my present age of its industrial adolescence.'

"Piece by piece, David Ireland portrays a kind of life which is lived at an oil refinery in Sydney - from its highest tower from which one of the workers plunges to death, to the secret hide-out in the mangroves where the men refresh themselves with such ladies as the Sandpiper and Never on Sundays. He takes apart this vast industrial complex and its multitudinous characters, then reassembles it into a mosaic fiery and macabre, whose crazy patterns are lit with grim humour.

"The huge structure becomes an image, at once amusing and appalling, of the whole industrial society in which modern man is trapped."