Shell opens in 1960 with Paul Robeson performing on the construction site for sweaty workers: ‘it wasn’t just the building or the place Robeson had sanctified, but the labour’. Observing the scene, Telegraph journalist Pearl Keogh is moved, unable to find words for her notebook. The next page moves ahead to 1965 as tension builds around the scaffolded concrete shells and rumours leak that young men will be conscripted by lottery for national service. Pearl, tough and fragile, thirty-two and single, has a personal reason to join the rising protest movement against Australia’s involvement in the Vietnam War. Her mother’s early death left her, aged fourteen, to care for her two younger brothers, Jamie and Will, who, as teenagers, ran away from a Catholic orphanage and are now of an age to be conscripted. Pearl, contrite about neglecting them, is desperate to find and save them.

The novel is, in part, a shadowy spy thriller. Pearl meets nameless informants who tip her off about the ballots, she attends campaign meetings in public bars that simmer with latent male violence, and she finds her phone has been tapped. As punishment for compromising her professional ethics with political activism, she is relegated to writing for the women’s pages. She continues her search. In a city bar she is attracted to a quiet blond figure who is the novel’s other protagonist. Axel Lindquist, a Swedish glass artist, has followed Utzon to Sydney to create a work of art for the foyer of the main hall. He arrives as Utzon is withdrawing from the stalled project, working from his Pittwater home north of the city, and subject to criticism from politicians, media, and some of his own crew.

The artist never actually meets ‘the architect’; nor does the reader, as he remains an abstraction just off-stage. Frustrated and uncertain if his work is still wanted, Axel wanders the bays and beaches of Sydney’s coastal suburbs, seeking inspiration for a glass sculpture that can express both the spirit of the place and Utzon’s vision. There are amusing reminders of his foreignness in his attempts to find decent coffee and to understand the local lingo: ‘Drover’s dog knows what the problem is – bloody architect’s never here.’

Shell is grounded in historical fact, but the narrative is a glinting prism through which Olsson examines questions of ethical, emotional, and creative life. Much credit goes to the author, a resident of Brisbane, for writing a great Sydney novel; with an insider–outsider’s eye, her recreation of both place and time is sensual and believable. She puts us in the streets and workplaces, the conventional lives and brewing social revolutions, with precise detail, startling images, and an artist’s impressionistic strokes.

This is a novel the reader experiences on the skin as well as in the imagination. The writing moves with constant action, thought, and atmosphere: passing days and seasons, flashes and ripples of light, heat, and water – the fluid elements Utzon and his fictional surrogate, Axel, are trying to make solid. Both have to resolve the influences of their cold, dark, white Scandinavian homes with Sydney’s steamy, golden air, turbulent ocean, and the shiny surfaces that conceal its darker heart.

Olsson writes thoughtfully about the creation of art – the architect’s, the glassmaker’s, the writer’s: ‘He was trying for something beyond [perfection]; for disturbance and emotion, the elusive quality of dreams.’ And: ‘He looked at what was there, but mostly he looked for what was not there. For the missing or the denied, at what might be hidden.’

Kristina OlssonThe novel pulsates with absences: Pearl’s lost brothers, her dead mother, and stroke-silenced father; Axel’s mother, alone on the far side of the world, and his father, who disappeared while helping to rescue Jews during World War II; Australia’s Indigenous inhabitants and young soldiers; and, of course, the architect. There are secrets, lies, and misunderstandings. Like Utzon, who preferred framed views and ‘saw the whole through the partial’, Olsson tells much of her story glancingly, leaving the reader to connect and deduce; on a second reading, lightly buried clues sparkle.

Concepts of commitment and detachment are central but not simple, most obviously in Sweden’s double-edged wartime neutrality and Australia’s entry to an American war; in Pearl’s skittering sexual encounters and ambivalence towards male-dominated protests. When the nascent feminist sets out to write about Australia’s ‘forgotten’ women writers, she is told by one of them, ‘The artist must take sides.’ But, the novel asks, which is the right side?

Amid all this, Shell celebrates the Opera House, ‘unfurling like one of their waratahs’, ‘a bowl, newly shattered’, ‘a rare and beautiful animal in a stark landscape’. Politicians have regarded the building as a costly white elephant or a profitable billboard, but Olsson and Axel understand its priceless value:

Any structure that aspired to myth and dream would look broken as it was built; all art was like this … Perhaps their leaders had not anticipated that the people would fall in love with beauty, that they would look into the bright mirror of the Opera House shells and see themselves.