Cass’s is the narrating consciousness, though not in the first person. At first she is suspicious of Marco’s interest in her Australianness. ‘Perhaps he imagined her … romping with childish fauna: koalas, kangaroos. Perhaps he thought her gullible and suggestible to old-world persuasions.’ This turns out not to be the case – in fact the American, Victor, though the oldest of the group, is the most naïve of all: he ‘talked as children do, sure that he was interesting’, and Cass finds his innocent enthusiasm endearing, while very different from her Australian self.

She becomes fascinated with the Berlin rail network. On a dark morning in an underground train, she briefly catches the gaze of a workman, and her reaction strikes her as ‘histrionic: she became wry and self-critical. It was her Australianness, she thought. One must not be earnestly conceptual; one must not think too hard on the allusive, or the enticingly symbolic. One must not mention the war.’ Jones is not habitually prone to comedy, and this last sentence is the nearest to a joke in this sombre novel.

It is not devoid of moments of joy, however. Cass and Marco become lovers, and their union shows her, despite her attempts at self-possession, the ‘glorious upset of the enlivening charge of the other’. She is also enraptured by the fall of snow, which she has difficulty explaining to Marco: ‘There was no convincing language, these days, for epiphanic surprise, no verbal nuance or refinement that might explain etherealised seeing.’ The progress of their affair – their missteps and moments of easy concord – is tracked with subtlety and, significantly, without any contemplation of her own physical self. She registers and describes the appearance of all the others – Gino’s uninteresting ‘generic’ handsomeness, Victor ‘professionally nondescript and self-effacing in beige’, the affluent stylishness of the Japanese pair. And Marco – ‘the curve of his bare back, and her own arms encircling’.

The only description of her own physical being comes late in the novel, as she stands ‘naked, thin and hard as a candle’, alone in Marco’s kitchen. In contrast, she has a strong streak of intellectual self-criticism. After her own ‘speak-memory’, she felt that ‘She was provincial, she was a failure. She perceived a radical lack of clarity. In not producing a coherent story, she was not possessed of those properties of necessity and fullness that make a plausible self.’ Naturally, she is more aware of what she has omitted from her account than the others are; she is annoyed with herself for mentioning the Nabokovian detail of butterfly-spotting, and for quoting Shakespeare after telling herself not to do so. Her feeling of the disintegration of self is magnified by the cataclysm which overtakes the group, and she finds herself ‘worn out with improvising a functional self against all that had made her feel so dysfunctional’. By this time she has come to realise that none of the group’s stories, seemingly so candid and open, has contained ‘trustworthy knowledge’. She has learnt ‘the failure of any tale’.

This phrase, coming near the end of a novel, cannot help but make the reader reflect on the tale Jones has just presented. Failure is not an absolute term. What is judged to have failed has been held to some standard, implied or expressed. Any tale will elide and omit, place emphasis in one area at the expense of another. In another novel, for example, the two Italians’ sexual rivalry might become a focus rather than a detail Cass barely registers. Jones’s novel is deliberately incomplete and in no sense a failure. Taut, chilling, and at the same time tender, it is another tour de force from one of Australia’s foremost novelists.