Anthony is Ted’s best friend, Claire is Anthony’s girlfriend, and Ted is in love with Claire. Or it may be that Claire is Ted’s best friend, Anthony is her boyfriend, and Ted is in love with Anthony. The difficult path this confused trio take through adolescence and into young adulthood lies at the heart of The Ash Burner. If this were a Bertolucci film – say The Dreamers (2003), which also deals with the triangulated relationship between two young men and a woman – the erotic promise of this scene would rapidly find fulfilment in the bed upon which the naked Claire poses. These three teenagers, however, have grown up in an Australian coastal town, and they do not opt for the simpler resolution of sex to help them untangle the knot of love, friendship, and inhibition that ties them together.

This blithe and largely innocent bedroom scene is a light moment in a novel that is preoccupied with the weightier matters of life and death. The great ocean, beautiful, indecipherable, and, for Ted, inescapable, is both a wellspring of life and an invitation to death. The novel opens as a young Ted tries to swim far out to sea in an effort to reunite with his dead mother, who drowned when he was small. He can hear her heartbeat in the sea, ‘there, along the ocean floor, its rhythm matched my own’, and he swims on to follow it. As Ted is caught in the flat glass of a rip, he spies his distraught father rushing to rescue him. He awakens in hospital with a deep scar on his stomach.

‘If this were a Bertolucci film ... the erotic promise of this scene would rapidly find fulfilment in the bed upon which the naked Claire poses’

Ted carries this visible scar with him through The Ash Burner; the wounds borne by the other men in the novel are less visible. It takes Ted years to recognise that concealed scars may register deep hurts, and that unspoken loves and losses may be felt with the intensity of those boldly declared. Whereas Ted’s contemplation of his relationships with Anthony and Claire occupies the bulk of the narrative, his evolving bond with his stern and reticent father is understated and far more compelling. The narrative arc that brings Ted to an understanding of his father’s silences and of his grief for his drowned wife is handled with great dexterity.

Ted’s vital friendship with Anthony and Claire finds its magical beginning in hospital as he convalesces after nearly drowning. It is strengthened by the seaside, where the trio paint and hang out. Later, when Ted moves to Sydney and travels to Europe, he is never far from the sound of lapping water. His mother is not the only absent woman he associates with the sea: Claire, too, is figured as a mysterious nymph of the sea.

We accompany Ted as he looks back over the years he spent with Anthony and Claire, both a little older than he, in high school and university. Coming of age novels can be heavy-going for readers who have more or less come of age. Gíslason captures the searching awkwardness of adolescence very acutely, although I did wonder why the mature Ted so infrequently interrupts and chastises his mawkish younger self. The brief moments of dialogue between the man and the teenager are what allow us to register the slow development of the central character.

‘Coming of age novels can be heavy-going for readers who have more or less come of age’

The young Ted has plenty of growing up to do: he is often selfish, often wrong-headed, and his attitude to the women in his life, particularly Claire, is extremely callow. We read carefully wrought encomia to Claire’s beauty and charms, and yet she remains remarkably lifeless, a foil to Ted’s emerging ideas about love and desire. If his youthful self-absorption is forgivable, we may yet wish for his growing up to have involved a little less waiting and watching, a little less desire denied, and, ultimately, a little more action.

I could not make sense of the title of this novel until Ted’s neighbour Eric finally provided a clue. ‘You can’t burn ash,’ he reminds him. Finally, the characters appeared as a coherent group. To let the ashes of the past scatter rather than trying to burn them again is, Ted recognises, where maturity lies. All the characters in this novel are ash-burners, people who struggle to let go of the past. It is only when Ted learns how to hold onto love and to mourn what is lost that he finally grows up and learns how to live.