Hughes’s first book, The Idea of Home: Autobiographical Essays (2004), a series of thematically connected essays, was a wonderfully lucid exploration of the disjunction between his family’s origins in East Europe and their landing in the tough coal mining town of Cessnock in the Hunter Valley, and the strategies they developed to accommodate this. It was a deserved winner of both the New South Wales Premier’s Literary Award for Non-Fiction (2005) and the National Biography Award (2006). Since then Hughes has written Someone Else: Fictional Essays (2007), a series of short stories featuring a personal pantheon of twenty-one people who had an influence on his intellectual development. The people Hughes admired in Someone Else are almost all European, the exceptions being Bob Dylan, the American assemblage artist Joseph Cornell, and the Australian sculptor Robert Klippel. This turn to fiction, which also marked a turn towards Europe, has been continued with The Remnants, and there is considerable similarity in style and theme between the books. Both are conspicuous experimental fictions. Boundaries between history and fiction are elided, while the canons of European art and literature are deployed in a playful and often profound grappling with some of the big existential questions.

Unlike The Idea of Home, Australia features primarily as a backdrop in The Remnants. Although all the strands of the plot are connected through Australian encounters, the intellectual energy is firmly directed towards the cultural traditions of Europe, and the Australian parts of the novel feel relatively gratuitous because of it. Rather than interrogating the disjunctions of migration to Australia, Hughes is more interested here in the allied cultural disjunction of translation, between languages, and ultimately between people, and how translation features in the cultural memory the European humanities constitute, as well as its inheritance and dissemination by individuals at discrete points in time.

The Remnants owes a conceptual debt to the metafictional gambits of writers such as Borges and Italo Calvino, both of whom feature in Someone Else. However, as a novel it is structurally something of a failure. Part of the problem is the sheer proliferation of its frames. The set-up consists of a novel manuscript written by a Russian émigré art historian, who has taught at Sydney University. His son has inherited it together with his other papers and, several months after his father’s death, takes a trip to ‘find’ his father, from whom in life he was somewhat estranged. The father’s novel is one concocted from his own personal interests, notably his theories concerning Piero della Francesca and his meeting in Bondi with a Russian émigré, Anna Ivanovna, whose tragic history under Stalin and fictional association with the great Russian poet Osip Mandelstam (also in Someone Else) forms one of the key narrative strands of the book. Together with this are extracts from the father’s diary of a trip he took to Italy with Anna Ivanovna, as well as a trip the son and father take into the centre of Australia with a painter referred to as W.

The frames are complicated by the fact that all of them are told in the first person. Anna talks, the poet Mandelstam talks, Anna’s son Kolya talks. Piero della Francesca talks, his close friend Eugenio talks, the father talks. The son speaks of his own life and glosses the lives of his father and his characters. There is insufficient differentiation between their voices, the effect in the reading being that awareness of the frames somewhat dissolves.

There is a clash of vertical and horizontal narrative strategies in play here. The lineage from son to father to characters is vertical, while the proliferation of first-person narrators is horizontal. Exacerbating this even further is that the first-person narrators are distributed across space and time: Russia under Stalin; the Italian Renaissance; Australia and Italy in the narrative present.

Much of this could be explained as the father’s limitations as a novelist, since it is articulation of these characters rather than the characters themselves with which we are dealing. However, it is ultimately The Remnants that we are reading, and it is hard not to make comparisons. At times I found myself hankering for the structural elegance of the vertical framing to be found in a novel such as J.M. Coetzee’s Diary of a Bad Year, or for the agglomerative power of the multiple first person experienced in something like Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives. In Coetzee’s Diary the triple frame of the essay, the writer’s gloss and confession, and his typist’s commentary, are tightly constructed; the distinct voices create resonance through their friction with each other. In the Bolaño, there is the central question of what happened to the Visceral Realists; the reader is like a child who explores the novel’s world in increasing circles anchored by a return to this question. Playing both ways, the plot of The Remnants heads towards dissipation, and it may be no surprise that one of the novel’s motifs is The Doors’ song ‘The End’.

The narrative paths of The Remnants are thus rather muddy, but what is perhaps most remarkable about this book is that ultimately this is not problematic. It is not so much the delights of plot and puppet mastery that appeal here, but something more quizzical and poetic. I have rarely stopped as much in a book to ponder the meaning of sentences, to feel the pull of concepts as they test my experience of the world. This is a book that changes the reader, not in a radical sense, but with the kinds of recalibration that quality prose can effect on consciousness.

Hughes possesses an extreme exegetical elegance. For instance, here is Anna Ivanovna talking to her husband at the grave: ‘Nothing prepares us for guilt, my husband, least of all long life. It’s like the cold as we grow older, an arthritis of the soul [...] While there is time there is still the possibility to make amends. He knew this would be the case, but knowledge cannot cancel possibility, not entirely. Only death can.’

The text is studded with such wonderful lucidities, and The Remnants, despite its structural vagaries, is a powerful reminder of how the scaffolding of the humanities, with its texts and traditions, enables us to grapple with the complexities of our potential and with living as a human in this world.