I did search for one image online. The book circles around the portrait of Stevenson – Tusitala – painted in Samoa in 1892 by Girolamo Nerli, and seeing the painting illuminates much. The painter, the writer, his family, and his Samoan friends populate the novel’s first layer of time. In the second layer, the fragile, haunted scholar Lewis Wakefield comes to Samoa from Sydney to research the painting, ‘to collect an island of voices, to hear notes of dissonance and disquiet’. Other characters pass through the novel, tantalising the reader in short, enigmatic chapters, moving about in this forest of signs like figures in a dream. Simile again: this ambiguous, elusive novel excites the likening impulse more than the urge to interpret. Like a forest; like a maze; like a dream.