Full of suspense, Harmless, is the tightly woven story of eight year old Amanda, whose father is in prison, and Rattuwat, a Thai man burying his daughter in a strange land. Abandoning their broken-down car on the way to the prison's visiting hour, Amanda and Rattuwat venture into the trackless scrub of Australia's outer suburbs. As the day heats up, the sense of menace intensifies and each of them enters the no-man's-land between safety and peril. With the right kind of mindfulness, William Blake tells us, one can behold infinity in a grain of sand. In the grainy bush tracks of the outer eastern suburbs of Perth, the whole canvas of contemporary Australian life - the ethnic diversity, its violence, its growing divisions of class and economic status, its convoluted history of linkage with South East Asia - is made vivid and visible in this remarkable novella.
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