Child’s Play with Eustace & The Prowler. David Malouf. 1982.

In an apartment block in a certain town there is an office where a group of young people work from 8.30 in the morning till 7 at night, six days a week. They have desks, tiling cabinets, a library and an information bank at their disposal. Their way of life, at any rate during office hours, is dedicated and austere: they rarely converse, they hardly know one another. The discipline they follow seems monastic, but - the narrator observes - it has more in common with that of sportsmen, preparing in every fibre of their will for some important event, training in groups, it may be, but each acting alone when the time comes. In fact these young people are terrorists. Free from the grudges, phobias and psychological defects so dear to journalists and their readers, they see themselves simply as 'technologists.
A crime only becomes real when it is reported by the media: hence its victim must be someone famous. The target assigned to the narrator is a national figure, our great man of letters', now 80 years old.
For six weeks the future assassin lives his crime in advance, studying the victim's writings, discerning in his life a pattern which leads to the final confrontation. Then the death is announced of the old writer's patroness, muse and perhaps beloved, kept alive for the past six weeks by a life-support system. The writer will surely attend the funeral: the assassin's call has come. There is,
he tells himself, a poetry of events ...
This novel, by one of Australia's leading poets, is a gripping study of the mind of a fanatic, set in a milieu of nightmarish reality.
It is accompanied by two stories, Eustace and The Prowler; in these the author skilfully creates a darkened world in which threatening implications point to sinister conclusions.