Coming from obscure backgrounds, Ash and Baba have arrived at a sinister interstitial space called the Sanctuary where they cut the hair of others who are passing through on their way to unknown destinations behind a black or white door. The two souls discuss their predicament and speculate on their status, the deeds of their past lives, the present and the reality or unreality thereof. In the immortal words of Freddie Mercury, 'Is this the real life? Is this just fantasy?'

'If he had woken from a dream, he thought, then surely it was into a dream,' Baba thinks, early in the novel. It is all a bit too Kafkasque, but Kafka allowed his character's internal states to speak mostly from their outward actions. In Asylum, the internal subjectivity of Ash and Baba is at times painfully ethereal, with every statement qualified and every thought questioned and turned around. The effect on the reader is sometimes claustrophobic and emotionally frustrating. By contrast, Kafka's uncanny effects were heightened because his characters had careers, families, and back-stories rooted in society and history.

Asylum is sparse on visual detail and characterisation. Ash and Baba seem more like capital 'H' Humans than individuals. Come to think of it, nothing indicates conclusively that they are human beings. Although they perform actions in the physical world, the characters behave like disembodied consciences, which is perhaps what they are. Through disorientation and withheld information, Hughes implants the reader into the lived refugee experience, filled with rumour, separation, random mercy, and random cruelty. If this sounds like a muddle, it is, but a pleasant and interesting one for the philosophically or theologically inclined reader.

The Sanctuary feels like a metaphor for the afterlife, particularly purgatory, yet at one point Ash insists that they are not dead. Hughes, to his credit, goes straight for the limits of knowledge, to the paradoxes of human consciousness, what religions call the mysteries. While Ash cuts his hair, a demonic client says, 'There's only one God and his name is Death. You know what I am. You've been there yourself. Why even try to translate? Better to chew a light bulb. I know all the tricks of the trade. I'll not confess.' Infallible Officials, the architects of Ash and Baba's limited world, loom high in the background, with the suggestion that all systems including so-called free democracies are equally coercive and inhuman. Particularly pertinent to our faceless Australian technocracy is the idea that all citizens share complicity in the injustices perpetrated on their behalf. 'Enter the bureaucrat!' exclaims one of the novel's snippets of social theory.

William Blake's 'The Temptation and Fall of Eve', illustration to Milton's Paradise Lost (1808 pen and watercolour on paper) (via Wikimedia Commons)A disturbing sense of desperate apathy pervades Asylum. This is Hughes's version of the Fall: 'And it was as the serpent had foretold. She saw that all the trees looked the same, and that the earth and everything in the garden was the same.' In the end, the subject of this allegory proves too diffuse. Life, imprisonment, seeking asylum, subjectivity itself. Asylum wants to be a treatise on political philosophy, as much as it wants to be a novel. There is too much to and fro, what if, should I stay or should I go, she loves me, she loves me not. The reprobate minds of Ash and Baba are intractably resistant to truth. Nothing is real, everything is real. It is all a dream and all dreams are real. You are all that is, even you are an illusion. Right up to the last sentence, and perhaps beyond, Hughes leaves the reader wondering exactly what has taken place. Ash gives a tantalising clue about the Sanctuary that is the key to Asylum's startling and well-earned finale: 'this place not only knows your thoughts, it corresponds to them.'

Asylum bears stylistic resemblance to Gerald Murnane's The Plains (1982) and to the works in J.M. Coetzee's recent allegorical turn. Like a real asylum, this book is a place for disorientation to lead to deeper insight. Asylum lacks both the knockout punch that comes at the end of Coetzee's novels and the expansive beauty of Murnane's filigree sentences. Then again, Murnane and Coetzee set a high bar. Amid talk of real-ish kitchen-sink trudge dominating Auslit, Asylum presents a decent start on the mystifying and alienating fiction we perhaps need to jar us out of our parochial heads.