The winner of the competition will be announced on Australia Day, towards which the narrative inexorably leads while Hunter wonders whether Kimiko is safe and whether she will be there as promised on the day. He deals with his recalcitrant father and becomes increasingly sceptical of the competition organisers’ exploitation of the Aboriginality he himself has never made overt.

Cameron writes in a style that avoids the comma where possible and breaks sentences into fragments beginning with relative pronouns, present participles, or anything but the conventional pronoun-and-verb, or definite article, we might expect. The resultant clever, fast-moving and straight-shooting vernacular style encompasses a tendency to ornament everything with metaphor and often wild simile. This is sometimes very witty and sometimes overdone. Nobody just does anything in this book: one character ‘takes his bifocals from the breast pocket of his gangster suit and flicks his wrist so their tortoiseshell arms spring open and inserts those arms slowly into that unlikely backflip of blackest coiffure.’ This is at once more interesting than ‘he put on his glasses’ but also, potentially, a kind of baroque padding. There is not a sentence that doesn’t work in this novel – on its own terms. The sacrifice is made in the overall narrative, which begins to falter the more it reveals itself as a series of juxtaposed brilliancies to be admired for their own sake rather than joined up. There are big holes in the story: though some excuses are given, it’s very hard to see why Hunter doesn’t go off and look for Kimiko rather than staying at home dreaming up all kinds of horrendous fates for her (rendered in bejewelled prose). A documentary about the competition finalists screens on SBS an improbably short time after it is made. In the novelistic world perhaps this doesn’t matter much. But it’s an indicator of a lack of interest in the narrative. I thought this tendency was more under control in Cameron’s first novel where (despite the weakness that all the characters tend to use the same hipster discourse as the narrator) the story is a thing of genuine interest. By the end of Tin Toys we all – reader, Hunter, Kimiko, Hunter’s father – have a date with Australia Day but it’s an exhausting wait.

The Salt of Broken Tears was a kind of epic, an appropriately antipodean, ironised epic in which there is no sea to sail, only the deserts of salt a departed sea leaves behind. Meehan’s new novel retreats to something more domestic, romantic, and humorous though with a threatening tragic edge. The geographies of his two books slightly overlap, reminding us that just over the edge of the terrain of the new novel lies the scarifying land of the first.

Stormy Weather has a later setting, the mid-1950s. Television is on its way and we are in the dying days of the Blind Concert, a touring troupe that plays in country halls around Victoria raising money for the Institute for the Blind. Events in the novel take place over one day in Towaninnie as the venerable Concert – now a sadly diminished affair – sets up one more time. There is strife between the pianist and his singer wife, the Barringtons; the compere who runs the show seems not to be in control; Freddie Barrington, fleeing his debts in Melbourne, might or might not turn up. Alcohol flows almost as freely as the torrents of rain (this book is rainier than Rashomon – and has more narrative perspectives).

Beyond the town lies the swamp and there, in a chaos of motor parts and other junk, lives a mysterious young man, the rabbiter. He encourages visitors to come and see the swamp: ‘Our swamps aren’t like other swamps.’ If this were an epic, he’d be a Grendel-figure. Instead, as some reviewers have already pointed out, he is closer to Caliban. I see him more as an example of what folklorists call the Trickster. His doings might be as simple as spraying drinkers on the pub verandah with mud as he drives past, or he might engage in more subtle acts of sabotage, some of which appear to have a malign edge.

It is quickly clear that the story will lead up to the concert, and its success or failure. This is a delightful yarn but one which plays on its darker elements to tease and threaten the reader with the prospect that the romance might yet turn out to have a savage ending. The story should be predictable but an exquisite tension is maintained. ‘Be not afeard,’ as Caliban almost said; ‘the town is full of noises, / Sounds and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not.’ But can we trust him?