The Significance of the Daintree Setting in Janette Turner Hospital's Orpheus Lost

Abstract

The story of Orpheus and Eurydice is a central one in Western mythology. In Orpheus Lost, Janette Turner Hospital reworks aspects of the myth in her study of the psychopathology of the 'War on Terror' which resulted in the 'disappearance' and illegal incarceration of many suspects in Abu Gahrib and Guantanamo Bay. Both of her protagonists, the brilliantly talented musician Mishka Bartok and the equally brilliant mathematician Leela Moore have sublime skills which metaphorically are able to move "the trees, / The beasts, the stones, to follow" as Ovid says in Metamorphoses (259). Turner Hospital adapts the myth, with Mishka as the Orphic character whose search for his father results in his involvement with terrorists, arrest, and imprisonment in Beirut.