This technique is used to introduce a number of other characters, each given enough space to exist fully and interestingly in their own right, their connection to William not spelt out, and the action moving from Canberra to London to Sydney. You even wonder whether this is one of those collections of short stories where unconnected individuals make occasional appearances in other characters’ lives.

When they all zero in on Lynette’s house in Canberra for William’s funeral, a pattern slowly emerges. Lynette was William’s third wife and Erin his third child; the apparently unconnected individuals are actually wives one and two, each with a single offspring, the space between births roughly a decade each time. The situation is of course known to the protagonists, but not to the reader. Cleverly managed, it dawns on us, intrigues, and entertains – until a certain bombshell shatters Lynette.

‘Cleverly managed, it dawns on us, intrigues, and entertains – until a certain bombshell shatters Lynette’

Particularly engaging is the middle child, the boy Ferdie, now in his twenties, who has flown back to Australia from London, where he was writing a thesis and being dazzled by the red-gold hair of one Berenice. In Sydney he stays initially with Helen (his mother and wife number two), but is unable to persuade her to join the throng in Canberra. Twenty years after William left her, Helen is not unaffected by his death.

The variations between William’s women highlight human diversity, but some of Halligan’s examples are more successful than others. In London Ferdie sees an archly seductive, not very credible ninety-four-year-old great-aunt called Pepita, who delights in her rose taffeta gown with its sexy neck-line, wears ‘gossamer’ stockings, and flirts with former admirers. For Ferdie she boils water over a spirit flame, makes pale, lemon-coloured tea in a silver teapot, and pours it into gilt and rose-painted ‘Rockingham’ cups, sparkling her dark blue eyes and pouting her small rosy mouth at her great-nephew. Pepita is there to show that age need not weary us – and perhaps to indicate the source of William’s penchant for the opposite sex. Could it be a gene running in the family?

‘Could it be a gene running in the family?’

Pepita has given Ferdie her old car, predictably named Pegasus, to get around in. It is mainly when the focus is on kind, nice, slightly goofish Ferdie that the indulgence in literary allusions tends to frighten the horses. It is not his PhD topic that is the problem (for once in the world of aspiring littérateurs, this is not a thesis on Henry James, nor on The Golden Bough, even though its delphic working title is ‘The Gods are Dead: Long Live the Gods’). Ferdie has not got far enough into his research for much of it to be inflicted on anyone; his progress is hampered by the worry that he might be ‘just another Casaubon’. Middlemarch is both Ferdie’s favourite novel and a regular tripwire for the girls he chats up. He only takes out those who have heard of George Eliot and whose looks are suitably pre-Raphaelite (hence the attraction to Berenice).

This reduction of the role of ‘Literature’ to textual name-dropping still distracts, but this time in a novel that is otherwise lively and entertaining.