Dominic and Mary, who grow up in rural Victoria, are described throughout the book as yin and yang – they frequently imagine ‘their pre-birth selves’ floating top-to-tail in the womb in the shape of this symbol; their mother calls them ‘chalk and cheese’ and ‘night and day’. They are both bright and earnest children, and deeply sensitive, although Mary’s temperament is artistic, and Dominic is geared towards science – two opposing, but not dissimilar, systems for analysing and understanding the world. Their world is punctured suddenly one afternoon by an unexpected death in the family.

This incident marks both siblings – ‘that was the day my childhood ended’, Dominic recalls, while Mary draws endless pictures of the roses sent in sympathy as they bloom and decay in the front room, a motif that she will pick up and return to in her painting as an adult. It also forces them both to adopt new responsibilities and start working to keep the family afloat. The people they encounter in their jobs put them both on their paths – Mary quickly and grimly, Dominic with far more patience and good providence – to leaving for Melbourne and their independent adult lives.

The divergence in the twins’ stories at this point is not just due to the differences in their temperaments and loyalties, but also, of course, to their different genders. Halloran explores the different constraints and expectations placed on them with great sensitivity and subtlety. Mary, headstrong, daring, and passionate, still struggles to make her way in the art world, and through relationships with men, who dismiss her talent and fierce will alike; whereas Dominic is taken seriously, granted numerous opportunities, and rewarded at the city university. Halloran is never heavy-handed with these contrasts – her characters are too well-shaped by the times in which they live to reflect too much upon this, although Mary has occasional stirrings of dissatisfaction, especially as she befriends other women artists. These include the brilliant sculptor Joyce Bremner, who tells Mary, in a line that rings ‘so true it seems unlawful’ that ‘men are always going to assume their work is good ... It’s their default position’, whilst encouraging Mary to pick up a paintbrush of her own.

The greatest pleasure of The Science of Appearances is its remarkably poetic prose – poetic both because of its rhythmic lyricism and because it so often relies on small details and remembered images. Dominic, for example, remembers Mary’s hands twisting her hair into a ponytail or the red darns in their father’s socks; Mary remembers domestic tasks from their country home, including slicing up an apple, focusing in on ‘the tiny spurt of juice as the green skin was breached and the white flesh exposed, the pits and ridges of the wood against which the apple was split’.

Jacinta Halloran (Scribe Publishing)The book is punctured by these small moments of intensity, each carrying an acute emotional valence that Halloran allows to resonate. Together, these work together to disrupt any easy linearity within the novel – time and memory are not simple here, but endlessly recurrent, endlessly present. Halloran cheekily alludes to this in an early interaction between Dominic, who is studying genetics, and his fellow student – and later girlfriend – Hanna, whose major subject is psychology. Dominic tells Hanna that his interest in genetics comes from the fact that ‘it’s the future’, and she responds by pointing out that ‘psychology is about the past’. Here too there is another kind of symbolic doubling, allowing Halloran to explore ideas of legacy, memory, promise, trauma, and pain.

This does mean that the narrative pace of the novel is, by necessity, meditative – meandering and slow – and while this makes for a lushly atmospheric read, it is also occasionally frustrating, especially towards the middle of the book, when the twins are lost both to each other and to themselves. The eventual unravelling of secrets at the end of the book feels too neat against the openness and languor of everything that comes before. The balance between the poetic and narrative impulses of the novel does not always find its equilibrium. But this in no way detracts from the pleasure and the beauty of the novel.

The Science of Appearances is a fascinating book, complexly patterned and richly detailed, and particularly adept at building vibrant places – be they Kyneton or St Kilda or Coburg – that feel lived-in and personal. It is keenly interested in the operations of memory, our imaginings of the future and understanding of the past, and the ways in which these things can shift and change across a life. Above all, it is a story about family, in all of its different permutations, and about love – and the kinds of redemption that both of these might offer.