A Title More Titillating, A Story More Sorrowing—The See-Through Revolver

Abstract

Craig McGregor, The See-through Revolver. University of Queensland. Press, 1977. pp. 207. 

Of course Craig McGregor's title was not designed to catch the eye of the browsing voyeur, and in any case such a voyeur would be sadly disappointed.
He would find the novel, as one southern critic did, boring; although a northern reviewer denounced its "public parade of indecencies and abominations".

The title of The See-through Revolver correctly sums up the theme of the novel which is the flimsiness of life, relationships and honour in the violence of New York's multi-racial Manhattan to Harlem districts, mainly from 116th to 123rd street. The time is the last years of the Vietnam war, and McGregor's protagonist, Arthur Middleton, is a teacher at Columbia University.

The novel is largely based on McGregor's experience of New York during his two years there on a Harkness Fellowship. Far from purporting to be, a lampoon of urban American society, as the northern reviewer alleged, the novel is in many respects a sober report of the racked society that McGregor saw in New York.