Hibberd’s first novel is a peripatetic and picaresque work in which the ‘Old Bastard’ conducts an extensive search around Melbourne and Victoria for his lost daughter. A highly enigmatic erudite and broad-minded gentleman, the novel bristles with unco characters, literary quotes, poems, recipes, sporting reports etc. The strands of satire, search, mystery, and epicurean chronicle, all coalesce in a delicately indicated but shocking finish. 1989.
‘…a sumptuous satire of high and low life among our literati, glitterati, and gutterati. The characters are suitably grotesque: the plot piquantly picaresque.’
- Giles Hugo (Hobart Mercury)
‘….a festival of fragmentation…This is a strange book, but then Hibberd is a strange sort of writer. Never sliding into crowd-pleasing like Williamson, never set in an ideological mode like some of the other Melbourne dramatists of yore, Hibberd remains, in fiction as in drama, funny, awkward, disruptive, even silly, and he would know the history of the word silly – it has meant saintly and foolish, and its central sense is unworldly. This weird, cussed, enticing book is all of that, and all of a piece in a challenging way – and so the more power to Hibberd’s cranky pen.’
- Stephen Knight (The Herald, 1989)
COPY of COVER of ‘Memoirs of an Old Bastard’