Most directly, van Gogh’s presence dominates the story entitled ‘Portrait of Adeline Ravoux or The girl in the Blue Dress’, which is narrated by Adeline Ravoux, the subject of the painting, who was the innkeeper’s daughter at Méry, where van Gogh killed himself in 1890. She recalls the painter’s distressed behaviour on the day of his suicide attempt, gives an account of his death the next day, and finally describes his dreary funeral. Her puzzled account of van Gogh at work on her portrait is compelling:

That may have been the moment when he added the flushes of red on my cheekbone, under my eye. And which only made me look more strange, since the rest of my skin was pale and tinged with green.

For the portrait, I had washed my hair, and tied it back with a blue ribbon, the same colour as my new dress. With my blue eyes, Monsieur Vincent said, the painting would be a symphony in blue. But later, when I saw what he had been doing ... I could not recognise myself.

Although she is bewildered by his unorthodox techniques, Adeline begins to learn to see with the painter’s eyes: ‘Suddenly there was green at the edge of the sky, not the green of the trees or the sea but the same strange coppery green of the thatch on the roofs of the houses that Monsieur Vincent painted. Which weren’t actually green at all, when you knew them, but grey or black. Sometimes brown.’

Using his first-person narrator as a naïve observer, Clanchy is able to meditate indirectly upon the mysterious processes of making art and upon the way a misunderstood and psychologically disturbed genius suffered in the limitations of the ordinary world. The death of the master as a plot device recalls Raymond Carver’s story ‘Errand’, in Elephant and Other Stories (1988), which describes the final days of Anton Chekhov and that last (apocryphal?) glass of champagne. The van Gogh motif works well for Clanchy in the same way that it does in Carver’s famous hommage to Chekhov.

Each of the seven stories in this collection deploys a first-person narrator, a technique that secures the reader’s engagement. Clanchy is also fond of withholding information, of a deliberate obfuscation that has his reader working to understand what is happening. On the whole, this is a successful strategy for maintaining interest but, if overused, it can become annoying, even alienating, as it does in a couple of the narratives.

The first story, entitled ‘Late Cruising’, has this effect. The longest story in the collection, it has at least three intersecting time frames and too much confusion about who the characters are as we enter the thoughts of the narrator, a middle-aged lawyer who has been rejected, after many years of marriage, by a wife who finds him sexually distant and altogether too ‘predictable’. Once Clanchy establishes clearly that the ‘now’ of the story is his narrator’s journey from Melbourne to Cairns to meet an old university friend from his youth in Ireland, the story takes shape.

The lawyer’s self-esteem has been fatally damaged by the failure of a long-ago holiday in the south of France with his wealthy Protestant friend. Since then, he has taken no emotional risks. On the drive to Cairns, he picks up a young hitchhiker and is inextricably drawn to him. They have a sexual encounter that changes his whole sense of himself; he is so enlivened by this experience that his meeting in Cairns with his old friend from Dublin liberates him from the past. No longer burdened by a sense of himself as a failure, he returns via Surfers Paradise to look for the young man who might be waiting for him.

‘Burnt Offering’, narrated by a madman destroying his house and furniture, and ‘Leaper’, narrated by an adulterous surgeon responsible for the death of a young girl in a hit-and-run accident, are effective studies in madness and guilt respectively, but I found several of the other stories contrived.

‘A Meditation for Magda’ is overwrought and unconvincing, while ‘Radinsky’s Will’ smacks of O. Henry striving to be relevant to the twenty-first century.

The most memorable story in the collection is ‘Vincenzo’s Garden’. It uses an alternating perspective as the characters, a mother and daughter, reflect upon their relationship. Initially, Clanchy creates the impression that we are reading the thoughts of an angry young girl, an adolescent abandoned at boarding school perhaps. This works beautifully to underline the shift in power between the mother, in her seventies and the daughter in her forties, as they clash about their versions of the past and about their understanding of the present. The tensions between them are played out in the reversal of the parent–child relationship of the elderly parent and middle-aged offspring. The conflict is a little too neatly resolved at the end, but the 74-year-old mother’s conviction that she is in love with Vincenzo, the Italian gardener, and has a new life before her beyond the nursing home resonates very strongly. If just for this story alone, this collection deserves serious attention.