Reading Matters

'Five Bells' by Gail Jones

Fiction - hardcover; Harvill Secker; 224 pages; 2011. Review copy courtesy of the publisher.

Gail Jones is an acclaimed Australian writer with four novels to her name. Five Bells, her fifth, is set in Sydney on one day shortly after the new Labor Government has come to power, some time in 2008. It tells the stories of four individual characters as they criss-cross the city on a fine summer's day.

There is Ellie, a tourist from rural NSW, who has ventured into the city to meet her old boyfriend, James, whom she has not seen for several years. Ellie's home-life has been troubled, and James, now a school teacher, is recovering from a tragedy that has scarred him emotionally.

Then there is Catherine, from Dublin, who is embarking on a new life in Australia after the death of her beloved brother in a car accident. And, finally, there is Pei Xing, born in China, who is still trying to come to terms with the loss of her parents, who were killed in Mao's Cultural Revolution.

Apart from Ellie and James, these characters do not know each other but there are fleeting moments when their lives intersect. Eventually they meet, but under unexpected and tragic circumstances, right at the end of the novel.

The book is not particularly plot-driven, but it is very much a story about characters, and, in particular, their inner lives. There's a quote about three-quarters of the way through that sums up the premise of Five Bells perfectly. In it Ellie stands at a bus-stop processing the thoughts in her head: her dad's untimely death; her mother's quick and unexpected re-marriage; of having sex with Jamie in her teenage years.

A bus-stop wait could cover all this, all this complicated history. A woman standing still in a main street on a Saturday afternoon could carry all this: death, time, recollected acts of love-making -- all together, simultaneous, ringing in her head.

In many ways that's exactly what reading this book feels like. You become totally immersed in the interior monologues of the four different characters, holding their thoughts in your own head, like a simultaneous refrain, and waiting for the moments of shared experience, whether physical or mental, between them.

Jones' great achievement is that she gives each character an authentic backstory and fleshes it out without being too obvious about it. In doing this she shows how memory works, but she's also able to demonstrate what it is to be human, and how, despite our varied backgrounds and upbringings, we are all much alike beneath the surface. In many ways this is a book about the deep personal secrets we all keep.

Pei Xing is a prime example. Her self-reliance, friendliness and kindness belies her tortured past. Every week she makes a long trek by public transport to visit an elderly woman in hospital recovering from a stroke. The woman was once her prison guard in China, but it is not something she has ever told anyone. Who, for instance, would understand their complicated relationship? Pei simply sits with the woman and reads Doctor Zhivago, which her father translated, to her.

She did not speak of Mao. She did not mention their large-scale history, the three-year famine, or the anti-rightist campaigns; just as she did not tell the most private of her family memories, the red-coat day, her mother's music, the times she had spent learning English and Russian from her father. And so it went by, the cosy lassitude of a hospital afternoon, washed in reminiscence and a snowy story from Russia.

The city of Sydney is also a central character in this book. There are recurring motifs throughout: Sydney Harbour Bridge and the Opera House; an Aboriginal busker playing a didgeridoo; Circular Quay and the ferries plying the water; the Museum of Contemporary Art; the sunshine and the glittering harbour waters.

And in this there are echoes of James Joyce's Dubliners, especially in the last paragraph which is reminiscent of Joyce's great short story The Dead, substituting the snow over Dublin for rain over Sydney.

There is a lot of music in this novel, too, a soundtrack that mirrors the cacophony of city noises. Catherine has Elvis Costello's I Want You trailing "mournfully through her head", listens to Sinead O'Connor singing Raglan Road, and has a crush on U2's Bono stemming from her teenage years; James has Coldplay's Clocks in his mind ("it is the curse of his generation, to have a soundtrack enlisted for everything") and is haunted by the disturbing images in the video for Nirvana's Heart-shaped Box which he'd seen as a 19-year-old. Even Pei remembers her father telling her that everyone possesses an "inward music".

Five Bells is an ambitious, beautifully written novel, full of the lovely rich language I've come to expect from Gail Jones (I've reviewed Sorry and Sixty Lights on this blog). It's a moving, rather gentle, story about coming to grips with the past in order to move into the future, of the ties that bind us to our families, and of the things we never tell each other. And I'd like to think it might earn Jones a place on this year's Booker long-list...

'Sorry' by Gail Jones

Fiction - paperback; Vintage; 218 pages; 2008.

Gail Jones' fourth novel, Sorry,has been shortlisted for this year's Orange Prize as well as the Miles Franklin Award. Even before it was nominated for these prestigious literary prizes, I was looking forward to reading it. I gave Sixty Lights a glowing five-star review way back in 2006, so I expected high things from Jones' new one and promptly ordered a copy from Amazon as soon as it was available in paperback.

But Sorry was disappointing. I wanted to love it. I wanted to find it so brilliantly readable I would find it impossible to put down. Instead, it was the opposite: I'd put it down and then find it almost impossible to pick up. This bugged me, because I couldn't quite put my finger on the reason for my unwillingness to finish the book. And then it occurred to me: I simply did not like any of the characters, a cast of kooky, unlovable and deeply confused people that, quite frankly, annoyed the hell out of me.

Is this a shallow reason for not liking a book? Probably.

That said, Sorry deals with some big themes, not the least of which is Australia's shameful past treatment of Aboriginals in which children were taken from their families and raised with whites, what we now know as the "stolen generations". Jones' book is, indeed, timely, given that the country's newly elected Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, recently apologised for a (now defunct) Government Policy that ruined so many lives and caused so much heartache and pain.

The story, which is set in the remote outback of Western Australia during the Second World War, deals with this issue in a rather oblique way. Indeed, many readers, particularly those who know nothing of this dark history, may not even pick up on it -- although Jones provides a helpful, if slightly cloying, explanation of it in her acknowledgment at the end of the book.

The novel opens with the central character Perdita telling the story of her childhood in the Australian wilderness. Her parents, Nicholas and Stella, are English immigrants. Both are relatively complicated characters with a love of literature -- their shack in the outback is filled to the brim with books, all imported from the Mother country -- but their relationship is a loveless one. Indeed, Nicholas secretly engages in sexual relations with aboriginal women, while his wife slips into a dark depression (she is hospitalised on more than one occasion) and becomes increasingly obsessed by Shakespear's work.

Perdita, often left to her own devices, makes friends with Mary, an aboriginal teenager from an orphanage, who comes to live with them as the "hired help". Their relationship becomes an especially close one, almost as if they are sisters.

It would remain wholly separate, Perdita's time with Mary. There was something implacable, sure, about what they shared. Mary was by turns girlish and adult, but she looked after Perdita, daily attending her, offering companionship, knowledge and caring advice. She taught her poker (how to shuffle, to deal, how finally, to cheat), desert songs (learned from her mother from whom she'd been taken), and the lives of the saints (the strange details of which she had read about in the orphanage).

But this tender relationship -- and one of the strengths of the book, it has to be said -- comes to an abrupt end when Nicholas is brutally murdered one dark night.

It's no plot spoiler to say that Perdita's life is changed from then on, but I felt that the death came too early in the story (less than half-way through), because the book loses momentum after this dramatic event. I struggled to complete it, because although the murderer is not immediately obvious I'd already guessed who it was (the product of reading too many crime thrillers, perhaps?) and so I found the remaining 120-plus pages a bit of a drag -- although the ending is a powerful, heart-wrenching one.

To suggest that Sorry is a little bit of a bore, a little dull, may be harsh, especially given that I simply cannot fault Jones beautiful, poetic prose, her pitch-perfect descriptions of the Australian bush and the sheer isolation of the country, far removed from the horrific events of the war in Europe. But the story lacks a certain something, although I can't quite put my finger on it aside from its decided lack of lovable characters. Perhaps it's narrative drive? Perhaps it's a properly structured story arc?  Whatever the case, my overall opinion is that Sorry is a worthy book but not a brilliant one. Still, what's the bet it will probably win every literary award going!

'Sixty Lights' by Gail Jones

Fiction - paperback; Vintage; 224 pages; 2005.

Sixty Lights is a compelling, captivating novel about one young woman's drama-filled life in Victorian times.

Orphaned as a young child, Lucy Strange and her younger brother are brought up by a slightly eccentric uncle. Leaving their native Australia, the family moves to Dickensian London, a city that was "too vast, too chill and altogether too drear". Later, Lucy sets forth for the more exotic India, where she sets up home with her uncle's fey friend in a wealthy European enclave of Bombay.

Throughout the ups and downs of her life (love affairs, depression, oceanic travel) Lucy keeps a diary "bound in purple morocco and tied with a black ribbon" where she "recorded and stored her apprehensions, not of events, but of images". She calls this diary Special Things Seen. Her eye for detail is so keen she becomes a photographer, recording the people, places and objects that so deeply affect her.

Given that Lucy is to meet her death when she is just 22 - this fact is revealed to the reader at the very start of the novel - her eye for beauty, photographic talents and passion for life resonates even more strongly, because you know (that she doesn't know) that she's running out of time to make every moment count.

As a previous post may have indicated, I fell in love with the grace and beauty of Sixty Lights. This is a gorgeous, evocative and handsomely written novel that defies description. It's a book to wrap yourself up in, a book in which you can let the perfect, lyrical prose wash over you. There are sentences in Sixty Lights that make you stop and smile, others that you want to hold close and etch on your mind forever. (One of my favourites, from page 126, is this: "His shape above the desk was a human comma: everything about him paused.")

It is ripe with symbolism and littered with references to photographic processes and techniques (for instance, from page 5,  "the blinding flash of a burnt magnesium ribbon"). There are multiple layers of meaning that aren't fully appreciated on just one reading. I don't re-read books but I feel that with this one, I must. And I know I will enjoy it just as much, if not more, second time around.