Moya Costello

ONE hot summer in Adelaide nine women working in the same electronic publishing office are waiting for change: "We were waiting for the drought to break. In the long heat, our bodies had softened. We were set loose from our moorings. We were almost floating free." Their suppressed, collective yearning forms a chorus of gentle movement towards a freedom and self-expression that's faintly articulated but strongly felt.

Meanwhile, there are the humdrum yet irresistible aspects of office life: stationery, gossip, coffee mugs, filing rooms, memos, the constantly circulating documents and the stiff presence of the male managers. This devious novel seems to go nowhere in particular, but all its detours accumulate into a fable of contemporary working life that's also an ironic comment on the straight and flat city of Adelaide itself. A smooth, sometimes sly narrative that never takes itself too seriously.

Brief discussion of The Office as a Boat as a hybrid text by Claire Woods

IN Moya Costello 's recently published novel, The Office as a Boat: A Chronicle, the novelist plays with forms and smudges the borders between genres ...

The forms of chronicle, fiction, narrative memoir and field study contribute to this text as a novel ...

The narrator is a fictionalised version of the author. She once studied philosophy, and still likes to reflect on things - on the nature of Adelaide's café society; the advent of the electronic book; identity markers in the modern office; and much more. And her essay-like reflections appear as tributaries to the main narrative ...

The writer as ethnographer of her situation - the field researcher - is much in evidence. The participant-observer perspective is turned to specific effect in the text. The skills of the writer as both researcher and author of a fiction are turned to the construction of the text as a dialogue of forms.