A sequence of inter-connected narratives from pre-World War One to the 2020s, Mixed Business is Alan Wearne’s latest contribution to the verse novel genre. Propelled at times (though never exclusively) by politics, there is of course plenty of room for satire, though the scope of the tales being told ranges from tragedy to tragicomedy to comedy to farce, with all the muses contributing. Given there are over one hundred characters in the cast, this is a book to be seen as a risky, imaginative, large-scale history of 20th and 21st Century urban Australia.
