Carroll has established himself as one of Australia’s finest contemporary novelists. Despite accolades and awards, his oeuvre remains less revered than it deserves to be. Perhaps his most mesmerising skill is his capacity to depict the worlds within his characters’ heads. He slows time in almost magical fashion, and his storytelling skips between eras with startling ease. Although Carroll’s prose does not particularly recall Philip Roth’s, he shares with the American master an ability to make the didactic shine. Whereas Roth’s dialogue should be clunky but mysteriously isn’t, Carroll’s characters offer – and the characters themselves probe – their inner thoughts, dreams, and memories.

A big part of Carroll’s appeal is the empathy and open-heartedness he displays towards his characters: they get away with nothing, but he exposes their foibles and weaknesses lovingly and without condescension. His prose is not passive or flimsy, yet his observations are tender. Although his ideas are complex, the storytelling is accessible and fresh. If he leaves readers with the unavoidable conclusion that human beings are seriously imperfect, his characters also sense ‘this vague, nagging feeling that we all just might be a bit better than we thought we were’ (The Gift of Speed).

Spirit of Progress is a prequel to the ‘Glenroy’ trilogy, a brilliant trio of novels – The Art of the Engine Driver (2001), The Gift of Speed (2004), and The Time We Have Taken (2008) – that track ‘progress’ in post-World War II Melbourne suburbia. The new book has brief bookends set in France, but the bulk of the story takes place in 1940s Melbourne, and the central action occurs across three days in July 1946.

Carroll’s portrait of Melbourne is rich and multifaceted. The city’s occupants are shaking off the stiffness of war while cows graze in fields primed for subdivision (and where Vic, Rita, and Michael’s suburb will materialise). Postwar Australia is a place of new beginnings and of relief and renewal, but it also seems that ‘this war will not end for years yet’. Carroll captures the confused times in a brilliant early scene. Vic sits in the silence of his driver’s cabin, watching as another train disgorges returning soldiers onto the platform: ‘And their arms go out, those who have waited and who now receive not only their sons, husbands and fathers back into their lives but receive their damage as well.’

From this poignant opening, Carroll interweaves the stories of a diverse collection of characters, some familiar from the ‘Glenroy’ trilogy. There are Vic and Rita (pregnant with Michael) contemplating parenthood and their own fatherless upbringings. George, a journalist, dreams of being a great writer like Hemingway or F. Scott Fitzgerald. Tess, a rich gallery owner, is planning a group exhibition by the ‘Angry Penguins’ (most of them desperate to flee Australia as soon as possible). A lonely old farmer called Skinner knows his time has come and gone, while Webster, a factory owner, already shows symptoms of dissatisfaction with his success.

The story’s heart, though, is an encounter between an old woman named Katherine – Vic’s aunt – and a young painter named Sam, a character inspired by Sidney Nolan. After Sam reads George’s article (and, more to the point, sees the accompanying photograph) about an old woman who lives alone in a tent, he rides his bike out of town and asks Katherine to sit for him. Katherine forcefully refuses, but a day later Sam has produced a painting – a copy of the newspaper photograph, yet much more than a copy.

On the cusp of seemingly inevitable fame, Sam mourns the end of his affair with Tess while he waits, rather impatiently, for a boat to transport him abroad. Perhaps it is because Sam is treading water, waiting for his real life to begin, that he isn’t Carroll’s most precisely rendered or memorable character. In contrast, Carroll’s portrait of Katherine is incandescent. A woman who has chosen to live a singular life, she has become, to the world, a curiosity: ‘suddenly she’d felt like one of those stuffed figures in a museum.’ She guards her solitude and her dignity ferociously, but Carroll peels back layers of her emotional core with great subtlety.

While Spirit of Progress is a terrific novel, it does not quite match the quality of any of the ‘Glenroy’ trilogy. Carroll crafts his words with such lyrical precision that tiny flaws and missteps tend to stick out. At times he signposts themes – ‘Progress’, ‘History’, ‘Speed’, ‘Hope’, etc. – too prominently and too often. This, in turn, exposes the story’s intellectual foundations. Occasionally, too, characters and historical context seem abbreviated: for example, I want to know Sam and Tess better, and the references to the ‘Angry Penguins’ are rather perfunctory.

Nevertheless, the novel resonates with the thrill, aggression, and sad inevitability of ‘progress’. In Carroll’s hands, optimism and melancholy merge to create some new and unnameable force. He does not assume that the everyday is profound but rather pays readers the courtesy of showing them why it can be so. An example: one night, Vic grabs Rita and they dance in the kitchen, a moment that Carroll, without forcing the point, makes stand for everything good and bad about their union.

Spirit of Progress is perhaps best read after the ‘Glenroy’ trilogy. While each of the four books stands free, Carroll’s ability to range back and forth in time means that they also swirl into and through each other. Spirit of Progress does not rely on the earlier books to make sense, but because of them it is a more nuanced novel, and a better one too. At one point, Vic has a chance encounter in a pub with an army buddy who ended up a prisoner of war in Singapore. Vic’s reaction to the meeting – his awkward and guilty empathy, for he stayed in Australia to drive trains – adds to Carroll’s already enthralling characterisation of this drunken, damaged, and self-taught man, this hardened sentimentalist. It is an absorbing scene in its own right, but it is weightier – significantly so – because of what readers of the ‘Glenroy’ trilogy already know about Vic.

The story’s ending, particularly the final paragraph, is superb. On the one hand, it feels like a fine way to close off the stories of Vic and Rita and the rest. But on the other hand, the ‘Glenroy’ novels all end in evocative and similarly emphatic ways. I hope there is more to come: tales of Sam’s leap to fame, perhaps, or Michael’s travels through adulthood, or – most appealingly – Katherine’s life before she grew old and sat in a tent.