Just as a new attitude towards madness is about to usher in changes in mental health care, Lorna Shoddy is caught in a net of petty greed and banal wickedness. Depressed and apparently alone, she is deemed incapable of looking after herself, her horse-breeding property is about to be sold from under her, and her destiny as a lunatic is sealed by people content to turn their faces towards the ‘development’ future of their country town, and away from probity and compassion. Finding herself in the care of the Master of Lunacy, all Lorna can hope for – and it is a hope which appears phantom – is that her long-lost love, Martin Shoddy, will come back in time to right the wrong of her incarceration, and to return her to her land.

Hall appears to be interested in the ordinary madness of people caught in their own anachronisms. His novel Just Relations, which won the Miles Franklin Award in 1982, was the tragicomic story of the inbred and inward-looking people of Whitey’s Fall, who hide a huge gold deposit in order to stave off the ‘progress’ that its discovery would initiate. Swinging wildly between caricature and deeply subtle portraiture, Hall’s method there, as in the new novel, seems to repulse readerly sympathy for his characters, keeping identification at bay. Even a young woman who returns to Whitey’s Fall to take up her place within the procession of eccentric characters only becomes the centre of focus for as long as it takes her to become interesting and to raise our expectations that she will be an agent of positive change. Lorna is more centrally placed in Love without Hope, but even here she is regularly sidelined within the narrative as our attention is drawn to other characters in the mosaic of the plot: a mousey woman with a violent husband; two of the nurses at the asylum, one a brutally narcissistic man, the other an empathetic female; the town’s desperately selfish nurse; and Archie, its doctor, a shambolic but principled alcoholic. Lorna may be the oddball queen of this particular Hallesque pageant, but she is often upstaged by the grotesquerie of other players in the parade.

The theme of the pageant is love, which looms large as a subject for this writer’s investigation, as he makes clear with titles such as this, and his previous novel, The Last Love Story (2004). It is not love and romance, but love as the ephemeral gathering of human desire; love as an excuse to avoid confrontation with what is too grand and terrifying for our understanding. We may come close to feeling our sympathy spill over into love for characters such as Lorna Shoddy and others (the doctor, for example, who is central to an astounding scene); but this is not writing – or a writer – that gives in to the siren song, and the reader must also be strapped to the mast. Lorna is a little creature whose predicament is pathetic, and we are on her side, but she is to be symbolically sacrificed on the pyre created for the funeral of hope.

After a wobbly incursion into the future with his apocalyptic The Last Love Story, set in a terrible Brisbane like city, Hall has returned in to a version of his New South Wales country town, Yandilli, as if his Yandilli Trilogy (The Second Bridegroom [1991], The Grisly Wife [1993], Captivity Captive [1998]), super-titled ‘A dream more luminous than love’, has developed a fourth rider: this slim novel, set in 1982, with Lorna as the last surviving relative of the bedraggled escaped convict who narrates The Second Bridegroom. It may well be that the odd couple in The Last Love Story, which Hall called ‘a fairy tale of the day after tomorrow’, are projections of Lorna and her phantom-husband Martin, but there is something in the style of that novel – a stiffness tending towards gawkiness – that is alien to the trilogy and the earlier Just Relations. While there is a bit of clanking as the plot changes gears in Love without Hope, its underlying musical themes are Yandilli-like. It is Hall back home, where he can be as flamboyantly idiosyncratic (and misanthropic) as he likes, as in this passage, early in the story:

The sky fills with spirits gathering to view the farm below, agitating the domesticated scene with speculations and swirling in their myriad inquisitiveness, elevated and murmurous, in the observance of a simple closure ritual – long awaited – the flourishing turf seen as a mere pall covering a recumbent and still-discernible female form. This gigantic female holds them, fluttering numerous as leaves in the forest, as a clan, crowded together and in no hurry: other intruders have not survived, but she has. They look down at her grass-clad form, half a kilometre long, and at the tiny squared irrelevance of house and yards set ceremonially on her head, at the horse trough held like a dish in her hand. They know with the knowing of two thousand generations – a vast and ever-tumbling avalanche of grief and laughter too cataclysmic to be confined – there is a heart here and the heart has not stopped beating, only half-buried by the soil and masquerading as bare peaceful folds of hillside.

This and other sumptuous, often thrilling, passages within Love without Hope are provocatively enigmatic. The paragraph that follows suggests that this female presence is ‘an old woman who does not lie quiet under the exhaustion of age. Her spirit is among them. She is tomorrow’s havoc.’ Hall’s intertext is vast, I suspect, and this little book is no doubt shot through with mythological, literary, religious and philosophical references. The sketchiness of some scenes does not always survive the weight of the intellectual apparatus bearing down on Lorna and her trials.

Love without Hope, the Yandilli Trilogy and Just Relations are just one group of novels in Hall’s deep oeuvre that is less well known than, say, David Malouf’s (Hall’s almost exact contemporary). I wonder if the reason for this is Hall’s lack of writerly good manners. It is Malouf who is often named as the successor to Patrick White, but Hall’s writing has more points of comparison with White’s. Malouf’s lovely, polite style doesn’t display the bad mannered, corrosive energy that marks passages in the work of both White and Hall. Perhaps, like White, Hall has suffered from neglect by an increasingly impatient readership. Both writers use words with such head-butting conviction that the reader can finish a sentence exhausted by the physicality of the prose.

But Hall’s novelistic project differs from White’s in that he is not so interested in story, although Love without Hope is pared down to a storyline that is almost too lean. Just Relations, with its fabulous setting and carnival of characters, is untidy, constantly thrusting out in tangents which then burrow the narrative down into fissures. In that book, what appears to be his central love story surges, then falls back into a fissure, then atrophies and is tidied up at the end in what might be described as a disinterested way. Love without Hope, despite its leanness, also surges into tangents and because it is so much shorter and linear in the plot development, this gives it a bric-a-brac quality, economical to the point of sketchiness. Several scenes in the asylum, before and after Lorna makes her escape, introduce us to characters whose presence in the story is hard to fathom.

Hall’s novels, like White’s, are uncompromisingly unconsoling. The bleakness of love illuminates not just this new novel but much of the Yandilli books and Just Relations. Maybe, looking at it from a sharp angle, you could say Love without Hope leaves us imagining that there may be a little after all – hope that is, if not love. But Hall paints a grim picture of a vicious society where the dream of love is a weakness exploited by the cruel. If the end of Just Relations rates as one of the most pessimistic and devastating of all time (where the ghostly remnant of Sebastian, father to a child with his sister, leaves us with the thought that all the riches of the world could not buy ‘a better society’ than this wreck that is Whitey’s Fall), the conclusion of Love without Hope explodes with a literal devastation, noisily taking us right to the brink of the chasm and inviting us to peer in. What we see will depend on how much hope we have invested in Lorna’s story, but only an optimist bordering on naïveté will see anything but darkness.

Love without Hope is certainly entertaining, and perhaps one of the most accessible of Hall’s novels, in that the plot is neatly defined by the simple question as to whether Lorna will escape the asylum and return home to claim her farm. It is like Captivity Captive in that respect, where the plot was defined by an equally simple question: who killed the three siblings? The ingenious answer to that question provided satisfyingly rich closure for the reader; it was an ugly conclusion, suggesting that the colonial adventure was a recipe for perversion that poisoned love and lives, but it could also function as a crime novel, providing moral escapism (the murder explained, the evil contained). Hall doesn’t allow us, at the end of Love without Hope, to sit back with a sigh of contentment that, however wicked the baddies have been, they’ll get their comeuppance and the goodies will be avenged. While the perversions of the custodians at the lunatic asylum may, our storyteller hints, receive just desserts, and those who steal land to destroy it may (or may not) find themselves stymied, that big vengeful heart beneath the soil does not, it seems, discriminate between the kinds of madness embodied by those who swarm above it. We are all, we wannabe lovers, doomed to live without hope.