Trouble in Eden: Marion Halligan’s Shooting the Fox

Although the stories in Marion Halligan’s Shooting the Fox can be read independently, they also form an intricate whole where individual stories complement and reflect one another. A Garden of Eden, fruitful and safely enclosed until corruption and loss intervene, forms the book’s central motif. Language and communication are also important themes, as is the writer’s role in creating fictional worlds, where, serpent-like she introduces discord and betrayal to advance her narrative. Halligan’s opening story, gives the collection its name, establishing most of the book’s major ideas so that other stories appear to develop out of or relate back to it.