Displaced Person (novel)

Displaced Person (1979) is a young adult novel by Australian writer Lee Harding. It was originally published by Hyland House in Australia in 1979, and simultaneously in USA by Harper & Row, under the title Misplaced Persons.

Synopsis
Graeme, an Australian teenager, is ignored when he goes to order at a McDonald's. Soon his mother doesn't notice him, even when he yells at her, then his girlfriend does the same. Gradually the colour goes out of his world and it all turns grey and lifeless.

Dedication and Epigraph

 * Dedication: For Margaret, La Belle Dame sans Merci, Without whom...
 * Epigraph: All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream. - Edgar Allan Poe.

Publishing history
After its initial publication in Australia by Hyland House in 1979, and its publication in USA at the same time by Harper & Row the novel was reprinted as follows:


 * Penguin Books, Australia, 1981
 * Puffin, Australia, 1982
 * Bantam Books, USA, 1983
 * Penguin Books, UK, 1988

The novel was also translated into Swedish in 1981, and German in 1987.

Critical reception
Writing in The Canberra Times Ralph Elliott noted: "This is a story with almost as many levels as medieval allegory. It can be read as science fiction, as a psychological study of adolescent alienation, as an allegory of man in the modern world, or as pure fantasy. It questions man's existence, not inappropriately in Berkeleyan terms, and focuses on problems of relationships, between parents and child, between boy and girl, between adolescent and society."

Algis Budrys, reviewing the book for The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, noted what Harding had borrowed and concluded: "What counts in the end is that Harding's book duplicates the long processes of time. In his own way, he has borrowed here and there, added this furniture to a common primal fear which he may or may not consider an original inspiration, and produced what amounts to a generification. Long after Aldiss and Disch and the rest of those fellows are forgotten, this sort of story will have drifted into the folklore, and when the Almighty looks for what was truly viable in SF, this is what He will find, smoothed off and grayed like some slumped old range of timeworn mountains, far more often than He will encounter some sharp-edged cleft or some bright, shining peak."

Awards

 * Alan Marshall Award for Best Unpublished Novel 1977, winner
 * Children's Book of the Year Award: Older Readers 1980, winner
 * Ditmar Awards — Australian Fiction 1980, shortlisted