This is a moving, comedic, and dark glimpse into the lives of an unstable family and society. If you are familiar with the work of Berndt Sellheim, you would know that his prose is meticulous and thorough. Occasionally, a by-product of this style is a slow-moving narrative, though Sellheim avoids this for much of the novel. It is brimming with metaphor and philosophical underpinnings, which challenges readers at every turn.

Redmond’s wife, Bea, is in prison. He has been left to support her sister, Lori, who is suffering from Huntington’s disease, an incurable condition in which brain cells slowly break down. Lori’s son, Mada, is a PhD student researching a cure for Huntington’s disease. Bea’s side of the family isn’t too fond of Red, but a sketchy business move might just get things back on track, but at what cost? Sellheim writes about family like few others. While the metaphor of ‘the fatal dance’ refers to the tremors suffered by those afflicted with Huntington’s disease, which lie at the forefront of the narrative, it also extends to the wants and needs of the characters themselves. Not to mention modern society’s drive to have the biggest, the best, and the newest, through any means necessary.

Sellheim writes like a poet, because lo and behold, he is a poet. His language is beautiful and rhythmic throughout. At times, though, you feel like you are treading water for pages at a time, only to realise that you indeed have been drifting down river all along.

The Fatal Dance pokes some glaring holes in society as we know it and it might be time we sit up and take notice.

Reviewed by Samuel Bernard Williams

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

I studied Nuclear Medicine fresh out of school. I finished the degree, but managed just a year as a hospital tech before I left to tour the globe, living in towns and cities in North America and Europe, waiting tables, working as a liftie, landscaping. I climbed up rocks, and slid down mountains. I hitchhiked across Canada. I slept half the summer on a beach in Southern Crete, then a German winter as a Landschaftsgärtner, only to escape the snow for a few months in Tobago before heading back to Australia.

This travel put the fire of philosophy and ideas into me. As I moved about, I devoured the essential local books. In America it was Kerouac and Kesey, Frank O’Hara and Tom Robbins. In Europe it was Camus and de’Beauvoir and whatever philosophy I could lay my hands on. In Trinidad a local I was chatting to on the bus gave me an anthology of West Indian poetry, and I must have read each poem in that battered volume more than twenty times. After two and a half years I returned to Sydney to dive into university, doing a communications degree, then a PhD in philosophy (metaphysics and aesthetics), and later teaching philosophy at Macquarie University, as well as writing and cultural theory at The University of Technology, Sydney

In 2018 we moved from our home in Blackheath, New South Wales, to Canada, settling in Portage Inlet in Victoria, a beautiful slice of heaven where Garry Oaks hang over the water. My novel The Fatal Dance came out with Harper Collins in 2021.

I established Portage Photographic in 2023 and I am actively looking for freelance clients for photography, video, copy writing, structural editing and strategic comms. Please reach out if you think I can help you solve a communications problem, or just to say Hello.