Ironically, Ocean Road is as much the chronicle of Frank and Laura’s love as it is an inquest into its final days. They are an unlikely pair: he, a wandering Texan seeking work and meaning through his travels across the globe; she, a Perth graduate teacher whose life has been lived a few streets away from the Indian Ocean. They meet on Cottesloe beach in 1958, where Frank prescribes Allen Ginsberg as an antidote to Ernest Hemingway, who appears to be troubling Laura. Both feel the tug of destiny beneath the ease of their banter.

Parry deploys the plain and telling prose of detective fiction. That his narrator is a keen observer of life invites further comparison with this genre. Toby, however, is investigating a death by natural causes. He discovers that he was a participant in the last act of his parents’ drama, not simply a witness. There are multiple allusions to the cultural currents of the 1950s and 1960s, especially music and literature. Toby is pleasantly surprised to discover that his nose indeed bears a more than passing resemblance to the one sported by Pete Townshend in a Rolling Stone caricature. Even without a solid grounding in the era, there is much in this language that lingers.