As its nursery rhyme title suggests, Jack and Jill is the opposite of fiction drawn from life. The struggles of its characters may be ordinary enough – abandonment, frigidity, longing, physical discomfort, family values – but Hodgman’s telling is far from it. Her language is an overcoloured, exaggerated, and hilarious force versus realism, tragic in its distance from the core humanity of the characters it describes. Hodgman’s people and plot are so wicked and impersonal, so jolting in our climate of autobiographical fiction, that they leave the back gate wide open to disturbing truths about the writing life and the damages it can cause.

Jill Limb, ‘that impatient baby’ inclined to think that ‘life is an all or nothing business’ and of ‘herself as a lonely outpost of all that’s proper’, is the hateful creature at the centre of Jack and Jill, and a masterly portrayal of the artist as distancing agent. Already at age five, the seeds of Jill’s appetite for artifice were stark, as she ‘picked the gold leaf off the covers’ of books ordered by her father Douggie, ‘and ate it, entranced by the glamour of her sparkly tongue in the mirror’. As an adult, Jill becomes a famous children’s book author who possesses ‘pencils sharpened to lethal points, and a folding canvas chair with her name written in gold across the back’. She lives in thrall to her ‘life’s work’; the saga of a boy named Barnaby, and ‘the version of things that her unconscious insisted on sicking up’.

When Jack, a ‘jolly swagman’ of the Depression, is taken in to work on Jill’s childhood farm, ‘Rainbow’s End’, in outback New South Wales, his unrepressed sexual desire and ‘respect for motherhood’ are neutered by Jill’s cool disinterest, setting both characters on track for rack and ruin. Teenaged Jill, ‘rigid with attention’, spies Jack ‘blowing his nose, pissing up against a tree, flicking his penis in that curious way before tucking it carefully back in his trousers’, while Jack spies Jill ‘off in the distance, collecting bleached bones of animals and birds. In the evening Douggie would help her write out descriptive labels and arrange the finest specimens in order of size on the mantelpiece.’ Briefly curious about him, Jill soon moves on from Jack to books, setting her sights on university and Sydney. Enraged, Jack raids her diaries and is baffled by the Shakespeare and Wilde quotes inside: ‘He couldn’t compete.’

In the first of two transmogrifying episodes – one banishing Jack, the other edifying him, the closing and opening curtains on the relationship and on the novel – Jack rapes Jill, in one of Hodgman’s most chilling passages:

It wasn’t so much what he had done – it was the bitterness with which he had told her he loved her and had done so for years … Severed kangaroo tails strung up above them dripped thick blood onto her face while Jack cursed out his pleasure … At night he came to her in fevered dreams, his liver-lips gashed in a grin, his thick ropey arms covered with their machine-gun bursts of orange freckles stretched wide to block every exit.

This section’s heightened mix of ironic realisation, forensic attention to detail, and dreamlike attraction to surfaces is typical of Hodgman’s prose throughout Jack and Jill. Unlike the withdrawn and selective first-person narration of Blue Skies, this descriptive eye is voracious, all-inclusive, skipping from one striking image to the next. Hodgman’s writing seems to figure Jill’s twisted artistic inspiration itself: ‘Like those dreams – she was forced to look. No detail was spared her.’

Characters other than Jack and Jill feature in the novel, but as doppelgängers of the entangled pair. There is Jill’s schoolteacher, ‘the nauseatingly dependable Miss Thomas’, who urges Jill to ‘look carefully at our own artists, too’ in the state art gallery, because ‘they are so often overlooked in our great scramble to gawk at European culture’. There is seventeen-year-old Raelene Greenwood, sexual enthusiast and ‘Miss Limb’s greatest fan’, who rapes Jack. And there is Hildy, ‘warped dago’ and mirror-mix of both Jack and Jill – a homosexual truckie and auteur film-maker, who ‘didn’t waste his time looking for answers. He knew that all it amounted to was garbage spilling over from the cities.’

Hodgman’s handling of the changing settings and fast-moving time frame, in combination with the novel’s intense descriptive language and bizarre psychosexual parable form, is startling. The novel’s fallen themes and hysteric surrealism have fellow travellers in Anna Kavan’s nightmarish Ice (1967) and Kenneth Cook’s black outback comedy A Man Underground (1977). Having read this relentlessly inventive slice of 1970s Australian literature, it is hard to return to so much ‘reality’ and ‘historical’ Zeitgeist fiction.