Oyster (novel)

Oyster is a novel from 1996 by Janette Turner Hospital.
Plot introduction.
In Outer Maroo, a fictional town in the outback which doesn't appear on maps, outsiders disappear and there is a queerly pungent smell, the Old Fuckatoo...
Plot summary.
In a town highly suspicious of the government and of outsiders in general, the arrival of a charismatic figure from the desert—Oyster—occasions an intensification of the town's insularity and repression of dissident voices. The conjunction of conservative forms of Christianity and anti-government landowners is ripe for the messianic presence of Oyster and the cult community he establishes, a community closely integrated into the shadowy capitalism of the area's illegal opal trafficking.
The fragmented structure of the novel, in which various moments in the past are interspersed with events in the present, generates heightened suspense and tension as its several sub-plots come together in the apocalyptic destruction of the town and the cult. The paranoia and violence with which the town polices its "lost" status are repeatedly delineated, until events come to a head and the vicious forms of control begin to unravel.
Women are crucial to the destabilisation and destruction of the menace represented above all by powerful men. The discourse of proud outsiderness on the part of these men is highlighted as being hypocritical and self-serving, while the real outsiders are revealed to be mostly women, and men who do not wield social power.