The prismatic discontinuous narrative Rowe has chosen gives the novel a shifting unease, so that each character sets off revelations about others (is abased society princess Evelyn really so blameless a martyr? Is Lani such a selfish wildling?) and transforms a person encountered as a passing shadow in a previous chapter, into a heart, sorrowful soul, and aching body. More than that, as we meet each member of the family, we comprehend their fears, memories and dreams – so that as well as the pleasure of her competence, the author grants us that real benefaction of good fiction: sorrow and care.

'Too old for teddy bears, too young for wolves', Ru is an observer, perplexed by the misery made by the adults around her, forgotten by most of them, and left to contemplate the claustrophobic house from the loneliness of a vast paddock. Excluded by her shabby, 'almost right' school clothes, she already knows that there's 'nothing you could do about that, except to get mean or stay quiet, act like there was nothing you were hungry for anyway'. Taking the second option, she collects cicada shells ('Sorry sorry sorry', she whispers, as they shatter), smokes two fat cigarettes filched from her absent father's tin, and watches her older sister cross a field on a motorbike in a thin dress hitched up to her thighs. Her sad, suspenseful reveries open the book, so that we enter compassion through this sweet, miserable girl, and are carried already convinced onwards into the vaster problems of the adults. Compassion is the irrigation of this novel set in dry-grassed country, and its limits – and liabilities – are the subject of the work. 'He's not really such an arsehole,' remarks Lani's ambivalent saviour Will, of Aiden, a friend who shoots fruit bats and fucks drunk girls. Aiden has long, silky black hair like a girl's, but he smashed a boy's nose once for saying so. 'Or didn't use to be,' Will goes on. 'Shit happens, you know.' Rowe considers the shit that has happened to each of her characters; she digs, like the neighbour-girl, with her nails through the carapace of recklessness, damage, self-absorption, unhappiness, and bravado, until the sweet blood wells up to show that each monster is human.

Josephine Rowe (photograph by Patrick Pittman)There is a risk with much fiction written by young Australians that self-consciousness will clot good writing. Anxious similes, prose cooled to frozen tastelessness, careful vignettes – there are so many exquisite, wonderfully wrought, boring novels being written. Rowe's is not one of them. Her style – whether it's Ru's lucid childish vision ('Sheep always look like parasites from far away ... like ticks. Or fleecy lice') or Jack's confused, scattershot blurtings ('A darkness there was no climbing out of. Fists sinking deep into mud walls. But then the dream ended and it was her body that was so soft'), is always thoughtful without being fastidious. There's no fat in this novel, but it's not coldly bloodless.

There is an animal metaphor running at the core of the book, of course. In contemporary fiction, this is practically obligatory. In A Loving, Faithful Animal, it is the eponymous family dog Belle, whose recent destruction by the savagery of a mysterious predator, is the catalyst for everyone's disintegration. 'What happened to Belle wasn't fair,' thinks Ru, who sees so clearly and is herself so vulnerable. It is to Rowe's credit that the death of Belle reverberates, in this haunting novel, and Ru's defiant compassion is not misplaced, nor is ours.