FictionGail Jones has a story to tell and a big point to make, writes Eileen Battersby
Sorry, so simple a word, and yet one that is burdened by history. Had this novel been written by a writer from anywhere other than Australia, it might have been possible to merely comment on the title. But Gail Jones is Australian - land of the National Sorry Day - and a gifted writer possessed of immense seriousness as well as a sense of purpose. She has a story to tell - but she also has a point to make.
And made it is with all the subtle brilliance and elegantly sharp edge she has demonstrated since the publication of her outstanding second novel, Sixty Lights in 2004. In this new book, published within a year of her third novel, Dreams of Speaking (2006), Jones, also the author of two short story collections, is again drawn to the ill-fated. An unhappy young Englishman, damaged by war and his own confused notions of flight, takes to wife a plain young woman, one whom he is confident will be grateful to him. There is no romance, just a mutual awareness of a need that is hopeless and doomed.
"Nicholas met Stella, my mother," recalls Perdita, whose older self serves as narrator at intervals, "in a shadowy little tea-shop opposite King's College in Cambridge. As he pushed past a customer, looking sideways for a cosy booth on a freezing day, the tea on Nicholas's tray toppled and splashed someone sitting to his left." That someone will marry Nicholas. The stain made by the tea is later recalled by Stella as "implicitly sexual".
The stain appears to represent the sexual high of their relationship. The miserable pair, ill suited to life and love, prove equally ill suited for parenthood. Their child is unexpected, and unwanted. Perdita owes her name - interestingly one that comes from the French "to lose" - to her mother's obsession with the works of Shakespeare. It is an inspired device.
Throughout the novel, Jones makes brilliant use of Stella's talent for spouting long passages from Shakespeare's plays, not only for attention but also at moments of crisis.
"Stella Grant had been an interesting child," the daughter of a baker father and housewife mother, she "developed an early, inexplicable obsession with Shakespeare . . . committing to memory a small selection of plays and almost 50 sonnets". Stella had worked as a lady's companion and spent much of her time reading to her employer, an old woman. Release came not only from Nicholas's proposal, but from the death, on cue, of the elderly lady.
JONES TELLS PART of the story through the detached and somewhat ironic tones of an older, intensely cerebral Perdita, who looks back on her wartime childhood with polite horror. Her narrative is conversational and emerges more as random recollection than chronological report, although there are references to central episodes from the second World War.
The picture Perdita evokes is of a lonely child who deals in facts not nostalgia. "I developed my stutter at ten, after my father's death. Until then I had been fluent as any child, a chatterer, in fact, a blithely self-satisfied speaker. But suddenly I began to see words before my voice could claim them; they preceded me like a vision . . . In my mouth syllables racked open and shattered, my tongue became a heavy, resistant thing, words disassociated, halted and stuck."
Neither Perdita nor the omniscient narrator leaves any doubt as to the enormity of the single, all defining act, that cost her father his life - and took her voice. But Jones leaves lingering traces of ambivalence.
Nicholas Keene bears the scars of the Great War. He travels to Australia in order to escape a life destined to be spent in his father's business. He "chose Australia for his field work because it appealed to his sense of the insane: what intelligent Englishman would go willingly to Australia?"
But there is more to this story than that. Jones is a very fine writer; her evocation of the voice of Perdita is faultless. It is impossible not to believe her story, or her memories, particularly her love for the Aboriginal servant Mary, who had given her such affection. Added to this convincing voice looking back in time is the effective use of an impersonal, third-person narrative which cleverly fills in many of the gaps. No one could accuse Perdita of saying too much. The assured Jones confirms that her imagination and instinct are well served by discipline and technique.
Sorry is polished without appearing either laboured or contrived. Even if you suspect early on who actually killed the father, it does not lessen the impact of the telling, which is as sad and as beautiful as it is brutal, and succeeds in making the actual crime secondary to its impact on the real victim.
The story, with its theme of guilt, is strong for all its apparent simplicity because Jones chooses to allow it to evolve at an organic pace. Yet for all this, the real power lies in the baroque, crafted prose and the atmospheric way in which Jones allows memory to dominate. Even at her most unhinged, the self-absorbed, brutalised Stella remains credible, while Nicholas, though far from sympathetic, is never quite the caricatured colonial, and the description of his surprise as death overpowers him is astonishingly well done.
STILL, SORRY LOOKS to a story that is far greater than that of an ill-suited pair of misfits and their unfortunate child. It is a memorial to a different family - the Aboriginal people and the many wrongs committed against them. Jones has a message yet just as she maintains a balance between the narrator-daughter's memories and the facts of the narrative proper, she also ensures that the obvious polemic which tracks the narrative through each turn, never overshadows the story.
Sorry with its wealth of dramatic images seems excitingly well suited to a cinematic treatment - an exceptional screenplay is pulsing within the pages of this often dream like memory-narrative.
During one of widowed Stella's quieter interludes, when she is working part time in a florist shop, she makes a purchase. "All her life she had wanted to be given a bouquet of roses. With her first wage - and even though it was an extravagance - she bought six roses . . . and arranged them proudly in a jam jar in their rented room. In a place of no adornment they were a gorgeous apparition."
In Sixty Lights, Jones looked at times to Somerset Maugham, yet even from that second novel and on through Dreams of Speaking, this most intelligent and intellectual of storytellers has looked to one presiding influence, one no less than the great Patrick White.
Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times
Sorry By Gail Jones Harvill Secker, 218pp. £12.99