Sorry

© 2007

Vintage Books Australia, 2008

 

 

 

It’s not you but me

This novel was shortlisted for the 2008 Miles Franklin Award and the author’s recent publication, Our Shadows, has been longlisted for the 2021 Award so I’m out on a limb in regarding both novels as insipid.
Set for the most part in Broome and Perth, Western Australia, the Sorry story told is potentially dramatic but reduced to melodrama in the telling.

Our Shadows

© 2020

The Text Publishing Company

 

Having not previously read Gail Jones’ work, I was impressed by the poetic turn of phrase in the opening pages of this book – intrigued by the extent to which it had taken up and sought to progress aspects of Katharine Susannah Prichard’s Golden Miles.

That initial joyous hope soon faded and I was sidetracked – wondering whether or not the author (like the novel’s fictional siblings) had grown up in regional WA then moved to Sydney, the degree to which postmodern ‘signifiers’ were at work, the extent to which Nell and Frances were supposed to reference Waldo and Arthur, and so on. Admittedly, I’ve been spoiled by reading Christina Stead and David Malouf – where the literary merit of the work is part and parcel of the telling of the tale.

Our Shadows is set in the same location as Katharine Prichard’s 1948 novel Golden Miles – the Western Australian goldfields towns of Coolgardie, Kalgoorlie and Boulder – and tracks the emotions of the estranged Kelly siblings, Nell and Frances, now living within cooee of the Pacific Ocean in Sydney. We’re all products of past generations, our shadows, and in wealthy (Scottish Presbyterian) families it usually takes three generations for the thing to unravel. The Kellys were poor Irish-Catholics, of course, so had no material assets to lose but Our Shadows mines the experience of three generations for the predictable denouement: one of the women returns to investigate the past, specifically the whereabouts of Jack Farrell, the father who abandoned his infant daughters when their mother died giving birth to Frances.

On first reading, then, for me Our Shadows failed to fulfil the initial promise of transcending Katharine Susannah Prichard’s Golden Miles. I’ll give it another shot after I’ve put Sorry up against Coonardoo but for now Kenneth Mackenzie, Randolph Stow and Tim Winton are still the best from the West.