Edwin Wilson’s first novel, Liberty, Egality, Fraternity! is described by its dust jacket as being about

work, life, love; friendship, sex, marriage, birth, death, religion, and the nature of freedom ’ and ‘individual liberty’, set against Australian society in the fifties and sixties.

None of which I can quibble with, nor as the jacket goes on to say, the predictability of this theme for a first novel. For alas, Liberty, Egality, Fraternity! is yawningly predictable, far too long and strives after a symbolic significance which is never achieved.