Kurdish writer and scholar Behrouz Boochani is one of Australia’s most important journalists, despite the fact he hasn’t set foot on Australian soil bar a month-long incarceration on Christmas Island. Since 2013, he has been held on Manus Island and, until October 2017 – after the prison was deemed illegal by Papua New Guinea – he was detained at the Manus Island Regional Processing Centre. During his time as a prisoner, he has reported prolifically on the conditions and happenings of the Centre for major international media organisations.

No Friend But the Mountains, however, is an entirely different endeavour to Boochani’s journalistic work. It is a surreal, experimental and epic account of his journey across the sea from Indonesia, his jailing on Christmas Island, his transferral to Manus, and the ensuing five years of horror and degradation. This is no simple exposé of our treatment of refugees. It is a deep, philosophical exploration into the experience of displaced humans who are treated as if they are not human.

Typed entirely on a mobile phone and translated from Farsi, Boochani’s writing can transmit experiences of terror, starvation, and near-death to the reader extraordinarily well. He describes his famished self on the doomed boat he caught from Indonesia as a ‘skeleton covered in layers of sunburnt skin’, surviving on the energy of a single grease-covered peanut. He will make you feel what it’s like to be forced to embrace death, as the boat he’s on capsizes into a churning ocean.

His account of Manus Prison (as he calls the Correctional Centre) details the stench of piled-up faeces and unwashed bodies in the brutal, skin-singeing tropical sun. Aided by supplementary essays provided by the translator, Boochani begins to lay out the concept of the ‘Kyriarchal System’, a term used to describe the social and political structures that have led to the large-scale and barbaric oppression of refugees by Australia. It is a system that we, as complicit and, in some cases, apathetic citizens, are a part of as much as the major parties who implemented these centres and the security guards who enforced the prison’s arbitrary and dehumanising rules.

It is so difficult to describe this book. It is literary, lyrical, political, philosophical, theoretical, absurd. It slips between prose and poetry. Boochani himself describes it as ‘anti-genre’. I read this book during the world’s delirious celebration of the rescue of the boys from the Thai cave. Commentary pieces pointed out that we responded so obsessively to that story because we could see clips and images of the boys’ scared and hopeful faces. Thanks to government-implemented gagging laws, coverage like that for offshore detention centres does not exist. In the absence of images, turn to this book to fathom what we have done, what we continue to do. It is, put simply, the most extraordinary and important book I have ever read.

Reviewed by Angus Dalton