“The Norseman’s Song is a weird and wonderful novel that weaves the violent, hallucinatory tale of a 19th century Norse whaler with that of wild, early days in Australian tabloid newspapers ... What I admire most about this novel — apart form the batshit insane bravado of its premise — is that it takes the reader ... through familiar streets and destinations and manages to make them ever stranger, more sinister and totally unfamiliar”

“A bold unfolding of a succession of nightmares issuing from probable truths and feverish imaginings, a striking juxtaposition of legendary past and seedy present ... While Deane belongs, in his idiosyncratic way, to a long line of yarn spinners in Australian fiction (from Henry Lawson to Frank Hardy to Peter Carey and beyond), his closest affinity may be with one of the most antic and anarchic spirits of our literature. This is Peter Mathers ... It’s good company in which Deane might like to find himself, and The Norseman’s Song is a novel in which Mathers might well have delighted”

“This debut novel is a three-part opus for the male voice. The first is a 19th-century Norse whaler; the second an Anzac, later tabloid journalist; and the third a modern-day Melbourne cabbie. They all connect via a late-night cab ride, which begins at the casino and takes the highway deep into the Gothic. The elderly passenger carries a hatbox, inside it a mummified head. He seeks the Norwegian, a legendary man-monster of the seas. The cabbie, who has his own personal monsters, becomes driver and audience. The diva of this novel is the Australian speech, superbly rendered. Blokes yarn: cut-throat tales of the cab-rank, news-round shockers and finally the stuff of horror movies. Two modes of Gothic meet here, American and the Australian, an uncanny presence since the convict era. They do battle in this novel, and the Anzacs arguably win”

“There could not be two stranger bedfellows than Ole Olavssen, the 19th century whaler of the title, and Farrell, the cantankerous Melbourne cabbie and ex-con. It is a testament to the marvellous control Joel Deane has over his creations that they can exist between the covers of the same book, let alone that they are equally compelling. The vital link is the sudden appearance at the Crown Casino cab rank of a skeletal form bearing a hatbox containing a mummified head. At once we are in Gothic territory made that much more eldritch by its ordinary setting. The familiar made very, very strange. And so the narrative shuttles between past and present”

“Locally, the best novel [of 2010] is Joel Deane’s bizarre, unforgiving The Norseman’s Song, which manages to relocate the seafaring spirit of Joseph Conrad to Melbourne by way of the New World”

“The Norseman’s Song is a refreshing, unashamedly adult respite from the anodyne family dramas that seem to plague contemporary commercial publishing. In a troubling tale bereft of heroes, Deane has penned a slice of Australian gothic that is a unique, and very welcome addition to Australian literature”

“When a Melbourne taxi driver picks up an old man he has no idea of the passenger’s macabre parcel, or how long or strange the ride will be. Nor does he know that it will involve him in a bizarre saga that began in 1837 with the birth of the man who would become known as The Norwegian: a name associated with tales of blood and slaughter. But he finds himself drawn further into the story with each stop on his passenger’s journey. Deane is an original, talented writer, and he does a good job of using his separate narratives to build a story. But it’s a depressing, sometimes gruesome tale and it’s hard to find a redemptive moment in it”

“Joel Deane, whoever he is, has written a fascinating and macabre book. It’s contemporary and old, and about whales and full of metaphors, imagery and the smell of death but Deane doesn’t push these things, he isn’t trying to make the story bigger than it is. He is simply telling the story and the story happens to be grand but basic, full of shaken up, confused men who have lived through (or are living through) violent times and events (all described graphically). And the story, the book, is so unexpected. Unexpected because this isn’t the usual realm of contemporary fiction. The pages almost steam with whale blubber and it really worked for me. The taxi driver and the old journo, the head in a box, the Norwegian, the whales - I can’t get them out of my head. ... It is a great feat of imagination”

“Joel Deane blends contemporary noir and historical gothic in a fast-paced thriller-cum-road-novel. A taxi driver picks up an ancient man with a story to tell. Moving between past and present, Deane dextrously juggles storylines in a narrative that’s both gripping and haunting ... Deane’s apparently been working on his debut novel for 20 years. That might explain why Deane barely puts a foot wrong, weaving a noirish tale of a no-hoper taxi driver’s geriatric overnight fare with the murderous gothic memoir of a 19th-century salty dog. A cracking piece of Aussie literature”

“This is beautifully written crime noir by a writer in total command of his craft. A gripping, yet lyrical, read”

“Deane puts a new spin on the gothic tradition, with Australian flavours peppering this dark tale of three men whose lives crisscross in surprising ways. It starts with a mysterious package containing a journal made from a woman’s skin, then launches into the 1871 narration of a brutal whaler, Ole Olavssen, the Norseman. The second narrator is a cabbie waiting in Collins St, a gnarly, racist drop-kick, who is hailed by “a bearded skeleton”. The deathly passenger directs the cabbie to the Mission to Seamen, Doncaster, Caroline Springs, Geelong and beyond, and his bizarre story unveils. Deane does a wonderful job in this debut novel of making three unlikeable characters intriguing”

“The writing in this crime noir is gutsy, muscular and full of intense imagery, black humour, and blood and gore”

“Two stories entwine in this sinister debut novel from poet Joel Deane. The first thread is about a boy in 19th century America who runs away from his vicious foster father and ends up first making ships, then sailing them. He gets a reputation for violence and strength that seems almost unnatural. The second thread is about Farrell, a Melbourne taxi driver and Bob, his mysterious, tormented passenger who uses the cab ride to make his confession. As you would expect from a poet, Deane has a gift for creating scenes of emotional intensity and for writing some truly beautiful descriptions”

“The Norseman’s Song is a novel that seems packed with literary homage and allusion – to Edgar Allan Poe’s The Narrative of A. Gordon Pym, Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, and even to Catullus’s poem 85, (known as ‘Odi et amor’). But for all of this intertextual reference, The Norseman’s Song is ultimately a page-turning thriller, albeit one with an unusual, inventive structure. Deane cleverly weaves together multiple narratives from multiple narrators. The bulk of the story is about a Taxi driver named Farrell (and, fittingly, he is quite feral), who picks up an elderly and seemingly delusional man named Bob. Not only is Bob in possession of a box that contains a human face, but also he is searching for a shadowy figure called the Norwegian – a man alleged to have slaughtered his own wife and daughter on a whaling ship. Bob slowly reveals how he first came into contact with the Norwegian just after WWI (and exposes much of his own dark past in the process). This contemporary narrative is interspersed with excerpts from the Norwegian’s journal, which has apparently been bound in human skin, and recounts his own mad and bloody history. In this sense, the story is a record of multiple voyages: the Norwegian’s life aboard whaling ships, Bob’s story of his first search for the Norwegian, and Farrell’s contemporary taxi journey through Victoria. The book also abounds with gothic imagery and gruesome violence, but, thankfully, Deane imbues even the grimmest moments with a bleak, absurdist sense of humour. The novel is at its best in its second half when it revels in its own gothic excess, pushing the genre into a kind of kitsch: Bob relates a string of increasingly ridiculous anecdotes, the best of which involves the story of two farmers who believe their sheep are being bayoneted by communists living on the edges of their property... The Norseman’s Song ultimately isn’t a novel that’s attempting to offer some contemplative, literary experience. It presents bracing action recounted through a clever narrative structure. Sure, if you step back and think about it, some aspects of the plot don’t quite tally, but neither, for that matter, do most Phillip K. Dick novels. Moreover, one suspects that Deane has wilfully avoided such narrative closure, much as Poe did in his strange and fragmentary The Narrative of A. Gordon Pym – a key influence. Ultimately, The Norseman’s Song is a keen, clever piece of entertainment, and if you’re looking for a cleverly told yarn, it will certainly fit the bill; without a doubt, this will be one of the sharpest, most intriguing Australian thrillers released this year”

“Deane’s prose is as tightly knotted and stinging as a cat o’ nine tails when he wants it to be, misty and ambiguous when he wants it to be and unmistakably of an era when he wants it to be. We’re in the hands of someone who can really write. This is a novel that you can put down, but when you put it down, you do so to roll a sentence around your mouth a second time and then whistle in appreciation”

“It is dark and unremitting in its very sure-footed exploration of human cruelty, violence and death. It has echoes of Joseph Conrad’s ‘Heart of Darkness’ - ‘the horror, the horror’ underpinning our fragile social cohesion, and how easily the bonds preventing our descent into hell can be destroyed. Deane’s is a mature, rich and powerful vision, and his novel deserves to be widely read”