Everyone is Henry Miller is not the first novel about the end of the world as we know it, but it is the first one I’ve read where I was left feeling that the Apocalypse will be more insidious than tales of sociopathic cannibals or giant asteroids would have us believe.

The action takes place in 2007 with the nascent worldwide financial crisis looming. It is written in the first person in the form of a series of vignettes, anecdotes and reminisces loosely woven into a linear narrative that follows the main character on a six week journey abroad to supposedly meet with publishers and discuss his ‘ironic masterpiece’, ‘Australian Psycho’. The story is also structured around an email correspondence between the narrator (only known as LD from the internet blogs to which he assiduously contributes his ‘progressive’, Walter Mittyesque musings) and his semi-notorious entrepreneurial best friend Henry Miller (no, the name is not a coincidence) who is in hiding because of various shady financial dealings.

It soon becomes clear that despite (because of?) a mildly new age and left-leaning ethos built around self expression and personal freedom, both men are approaching forty with a fixation for young women and internet pornography. LD’s journey descends into a tawdry hunt for sexual gratification that he tries to convince himself is both self affirming and impressive to his coterie of male friends back in Australia.

The idea that the sixties were swinging quickly seems quaint in light of LD’s banal encounters with the women (and men) he meets through internet dating sites and at sex clubs. Finding love of course is a different matter and this is brought home when we realise that LD was once married but has become inexplicably widowed. His occasional brief passages pertaining to the pain of this loss are the sole allusions towards any real warmth or potential redemption.

Everyone is Henry Miller borders on porn with long passages intricately describing both banal and odd sexual interludes and practices. LD is quick to tell everyone he encounters about ‘Australian Psycho’ which invariably creates confusion because of Brett Easton Ellis’s similarly titled and famously gruesome fable. One suspects that Dunne’s endless descriptions of LD’s sexual exploits – which he gets away with by and large because they are often very funny - are a dig at Ellis’s rambling indulgences in orgiastic violence and political incorrectness.

There are no chapters, but there is an unusual tempo and flow to the book. Long sentences are invariably followed by those consisting of only a few, if not a single word and this highlights the silly earnestness of what came before with the sharpness of a left jab.

There is no real character development, although at the inevitable (yet still surprising) train wreck ending, LD is finally forced to face what we have suspected from page one - he is as vain and vacuous as Henry Miller and his late wife - or at least the discipline she demanded of him – was his (all mens’?) most valuable asset. This idea may sit more comfortably with devout Islamic clerics (bare breasts cause earthquakes after all) than with Germaine Greer, but given the way today’s young men happily up the ante of their female counterparts’ bad behaviour, it’s hard not to give some credence to Dunne’s apparent concerns.

What’s scary about Everyone is Henry Miller is that everything within its pages can be read in the daily news, found a couple of clicks away with your mouse or endured on public transport. The sum of its parts adds up to the more terrifying whole of an unsustainable culture living beyond its means and being weakened daily by schizophrenic socio-technological change and easy access to instant gratification in the form of booze, porn, sex and debt.

According to Dunne, the very biological urge to move forward, to push on is what has created the affluence that will be undone by the freedom that it affords. We all seem to be at the whims of tides we don’t even see and our sense of uniqueness (everyone LD meets on his journey is pursuing some artistic endeavour or is obsessed with smothering their bodies with tattoos) makes us all the more oblivious. In a deconstructed, homogenised world this notion of uniqueness seems absurd, and Dunne implies that this terrible contradiction will wreak more havoc in a future faced with material and moral scarcity.

One thing is for certain though – blood sucking zombie barbarians are at the gate. I just never thought they would be in the form of an 18 year old nymph trying to get me to sign up to a thirty year home loan on a depreciating asset.