The other three are in thrall to music and, in Sean and Zoe’s case, to Ramsay as well. The oldest and natural leader of the gang, his passion for, and mastery of, the piano has a mesmerising effect on them both. Into this adolescent world comes the boys’ needy and forceful stepfather, George, who, recognising a personal project in the self-centred budding maestro, takes control, to the exclusion of Sean, Ramsay’s adoring music partner. George’s malign and growing influence is clarified during a tense concert, which marks the end of the ideal and the beginning of memory’s reach into the characters’ futures.

Ideas, personal relationships, and fundamental psychological drivers are familiar ingredients in Goldsmith’s fiction. In The Prosperous Thief (2002), she achieved a compelling and well-realised exposition of forgiveness around issues of the Holocaust. But memory is a much more fluid and subjective concept, and this time Goldsmith struggles to come to grips with characters and situations that entirely convince.

It is not for want of trying, however, and Goldsmith sustains a narrative of shattered, misspent lives that ponders memory’s many facets and deceits. The exception is Nina, who is able to envision a life beyond music and becomes disenchanted early on with selfish, obsessive Ramsay, whose relationship with others is based solely on what they can do for him. Narcissistic and borderline Asperger’s, he is an unbeguiling genius whose grip on Sean and Zoe’s memories of better times never quite rings true. Despite traumatic upsets in her adult life, Nina demonstrates a healthy ability to integrate past and present into a workable future – her experience as a consultant on memorial projects providing similar life skills. 

Not so Sean, whose career as a foreign correspondent and travel writer represents a flightboth physical and emotional from the hurt inflicted by Ramsay and George. Marked by an increasing lack of fulfilment, he remains Nina’s best friend, prevails on the goodwill of his long-suffering lover, Tom, is writing but never finishing books on an ever-changing range of subjects, has lost his good looks, and has fallen into the grip of grub and the grape.

Zoe’s adult existence is dominated by her slavish, unrequited, delusional love for Ramsay. While waiting for George to get out of the way, she marries Elliot. Their relationship, which begins promisingly in New York, disintegrates when they return to Melbourne and to Ramsay, who is now a star on the international concert circuit. Zoe’s life is a mask of competence and perfection designed to impose order on her private chaos. Forever holding herself in readiness for Ramsay, she is polite but distant with Elliot, a former alcoholic who is now addicted to her – the less she cares, the more he does – and to writing biographies of ‘big women’ like Elizabeth Hardwick, the wife and emotional victim of poet Robert Lowell. 

It is into this mash of memories that Nina returns on a working visit to Melbourne, during which she and her project become something of a catalyst for confronting memory’s fallout. Debate about how her monument might be realised, for example, sparks a thought-provoking conversation about memory in which its chief victims, Sean and Zoe, discuss remembrance. Sean is all for deliberate forgetting and against counselling (which clearly might have helped him), while Zoe, who has forgotten nothing, hides everything, and fools no one, and wonders if, despite forgetting, the truth might eventually seep out. In the end, memory’s trap is finally sprung by George, the original catalyst.

But was it memory that trapped them in the first place? Ramsay is a sociopath, Sean and Zoe are classic examples of arrested development, and Elliot has an addictive personality. All are in the grip of memories that have nothing to do with reality, which is one of memory’s tricks or traps, to be sure, but by no means the only one. Memory plays tricks, but it is also a tricky subject that Andrea Goldsmith’s novel, though worthy and thought-provoking, ultimately fails to illuminate.