Betrayal because Richard loves everyone, especially his oldest friend, Hugh, a man so desperately in love with Richard’s wife, Pup, that he is literally dying of it. If you recall the tawdry genius for adultery that drove The Good Soldier, then you’ll get the idea: the central narrator’s constant revisiting of memories and places, only to find the meaning of a word, gesture, act radically shifted in the light of a story unravelling in reverse; a story in which he has held no part.

It was because of Hugh that Richard met and eventually married Pup, the clever, sophisticated daughter of Anglo- Jewish émigrés. Squaring the triangle, Hugh courted and won Helen, a woman of forbidding beauty whose family shared with Richard’s a more resolutely middle-class origin. The two couples – rich, beautiful and careless in a Gatsbyan way – lead a charmed life, broken at yearly intervals with a group holiday at Palm Beach, the Summerland of the title. But, as Jordan Baker puts it in Gatsby: ‘I hate careless people. Somehow they are a lie.’ And this is true for the two couples. Like the narrator of The Good Soldier, Richard has been cuckolded by Hugh, with Helen’s consent, even assistance. The novel’s dénouement sees the narrative flooded with the long-withheld truth of this liaison and its ultimate effects upon the four.

Summerland nods wryly toward its predecessors, two novels whose bitterness is relieved only by their perfection. And yet it feels inappropriate to hold this story up to them, to compare and contrast them at Summerland’s expense. The rich are different down-under, too, and, in his obsessive mapping of Sydney’s geo-social landscape (the suburbby-suburb breakdown of the northern beaches is no less splendid than the East Egg/West Egg distinction in Gatsby), the author is staking a claim for uniqueness. This is certainly fresh territory, demanding demarcation.

After the grinding intensity of Summerland, Stephen Carroll’s fourth novel – like the train drivers its title celebrates – offers a frictionless ride. This is not to suggest that its constituent actions hold no weight; Carroll’s narrators tell their stories at such a distance of memory from the events they describe that their various sadnesses are muted, sepia-tinted. While in Knox’s novel the manipulation of time tightens, piles on the emotional distress caused by human events, The Art of the Engine Driver uses time to diffuse hurt – here it is the balm that heals all wounds.

As always, the difference between these two states is a question of scale, with Carroll’s story shared out amongst numerous Victorian townsfolk during a single evening – an engagement party – in the decade following World War II. These figures all stand at the threshold of change, much as the trains they drive have moved from steam to diesel, the country village they inhabit grown towards suburban hinterland. Adulthood is tied conspicuously to modernity and its effects: rock and roll supplanting a blander, more decorous music; television replacing radio. And the question each character asks of themselves is: ‘How does it behoove me to embrace or refuse the enticements of this New World?’ Their various answers cancel one another out, but, in doing so, form an either/or tableau that invites the reader’s recognition – these are the questions we ask of ourselves, still.

The image of the driven engine is apposite, given the novel’s course. Vic, alcoholic husband of Rita, father to Michael, is a man whose sanctuary is this work: driving the new breed of diesel engines that ferry the state’s population. Carroll makes much of the inherent poetry of this labour but permits Rita equal voice in reflecting upon the unhappiness that his daily, boozy absences create. It is for their son, Michael, to balance their competing claims for the reader’s sympathy. He’s held aloof from their battles by virtue of his adult self, looking back at the three of them on that single evening across a decades-wide divide. Even when permitted his own child’s-eye access to the story, Michael lacks the adult understanding necessary for judgment and complaint. In both guises, he can forgive the pain these adults mete out through a nostalgic or impartial affection.

As the three make their way to the party, the boy’s curiosity fixes upon the denizens of the town, each of whom is given a voice with which to braid their fates with those of Vic and Rita’s family. Wartime émigrés, ten-pound poms, teddy boys and battered wives all slip in and out of narrative control, each offering their version of domestic sadness, of choices made or unmade, decisions whose effects are rendered null by the deaths that are said to await them, whether in an hour, a week, or twenty years.

It would be unnecessarily grim to suggest that it is death that provides all these stories with a semblance of solidarity. It is a more celebratory novel than that, reminiscent, in its rural-industrial poetics, its muted tones of honeyed melancholy, of Michael Ondaatje’s In the Skin of a Lion, another story constructed from multiple narrators, another tale of those who built the cities we inhabit today. In it, anticipating the perplexity readers might experience at the sheer breadth of such a democratic schema, the author steps in with an aside that will serve Carroll’s readers just as well: ‘Don’t be afraid. There is order here. Very faint. Very human.’