If this was all, it would be a treat. There is more.

Initially, the woman is engaged in a rereading of the Australia she visited as a bride twenty years ago. It has changed and so has she. She is cast as the barren ‘goose girl’ whose husband has died in a tanker accident at sea and who embarks ‘on a wild goose chase’ to escape burial alive as a widow in her husband’s Finland home. Abroad, adrift, she finds a degree of acceptance in a sleepy backwater in ‘Swanhaven, Australia, of all places, the far keel of the world’. The old world of past experience is not, however, so easily left behind:

The channel is deep that drains Swan Water into the bay.

The boat harbour lies along it. Out in the strait and then the ocean out of sight of all lighthouses are the whales and dolphins and loud seals, sea lions and elephants, penguins, the stormy latitudes and the islands, of rock, of snow, and further on through the slurry and pack ice, the silent Antarctic bays, where Finn went.

This book is about reality and reflection, origins and tomorrows. We are offered evidence and possible meaning but not supplied with, or inhibited by, the closure of answers. Death co-exists with healing and reconciliation, fear with exultation and love with loss. Farmer is vitally interested in people (and often wickedly accurate with dialogue) but also concerned with the issues that inform and control our lives. Throughout, diverse elements are skilfully interrelated.

What are they and how is this achieved? Once such magic might have been labelled as witchcraft – and this is a book about shamanism, gender and cultural inscription. We now know that effective narratives are controlled by skilled authors who, like Ariadne weaving, may bring new worlds into being as they manipulate words, images, tension and release. Farmer’s designs are subtle. The narrator of this story is translating between her Danish language frame of reference and the new world order of her immediate experience. The reader is, therefore, engaged with her acquisition of meaning and subject to a process of testing/tasting - a holding up to the light of the fabric of language. It becomes apparent that words strung together may be ‘links’ (in a positive sense) or webs that ensnare. (At points of the narrative, the narrator clears encroaching gossamer threads away from her house to admit more light and finds, ‘Gossamer, goose-summer, the threads which connect with the past’.) The novel reveals the tenacity and frailty of human endeavour, the power of the imagination and the manner in which we script ourselves into being.

The nearest analogy I can offer for the structure and content does not come from fiction but film, but this is perhaps apt given Farmer’s recourse to film as well as a wealth of other writing in this intertextual smorgasbord. (A look at the acknowledgments is illuminating.) There is a small gem called ‘Camera Natura’ which reads Australia’s history through the various frames of language and measurement, the perceptual grids that have been overlaid in an attempt to tame or colonise its vast space. The film tracks relationships between woman/man and land, the effects of ‘progress’, the appropriation of nature and the disastrous consequences of going faster and seeing less. At the brink of holocaust its narrating voice changes gender, takes up the pen and writes a new story having forsaken the pioneered ‘tracks leading nowhere’. The film, like this novel, is speculative. It asks, ‘if something is caught, how much more is lost?’

We who live on the green rim can put what is out of sight out of mind only for so long. This is the two hundredth year that the land is in white hands, and the desert is twice the size it was in 1788. The rivers and sea are a swill of excrement and silt, farm and factory waste. Ancient rain forests are felled and left lifeless, and the rains fail. The silt that runs off the old forest floor chokes the fish and coral reefs to death. The land withers under its white burdens of wheat and sheep, rabbits, foxes, dogs and cats, donkeys, camels, water buffalo. From horizon to horizon vast lands are already dry dust under a white shimmer like ice, the death mask of the salt. A waste land where the salt crystals grow and grow, in the shade of skeleton trees. In the myth of the waste land, says the speaker, a curse was laid on the land.

This is a strong voice expressing concerns about global warming, ozone depletion, the effects of chlorofluorocarbons and dioxins and the beleaguered world of animals close to extinction because of the persistent ‘blood bath’ of whaling, seal-hunting, driftnet fishing – and politics. Surely the spectre of the ‘death of the sea’ should haunt those who continue to exist in ‘the land of the happy dead who live in abundance’.

This sounds like heavy going but these issues emerge from the preoccupations of the central story, from the conversations of Dagmar’s acquaintance, from her reading as she confronts the past and from the interconnections implied through the recontextualisation of images. This is the same narrative ‘voice’ which can describe a kitten ‘as baggy as a mandarin’.

In a small but possibly central scene, the narrator remembers being inside a spiral lighthouse and looking into a camera obscura, which is a darkened chamber or box into which light is admitted through a double convex lens to form an image of external objects on paper or glass placed at the focus of the lens. As a metaphor for the artist’s distanced view this is persuasive. But here, the child sees her father’s world but cannot communicate with it. In the adult woman’s life, patriarchal language comes to be seen as fossilised, and beloved Martin regrettably revealed as its spokesperson.

Martin ‘opens doors and stands back’. His literary knowledge is set against Dagmar’s actual experience. She is widowed; he is between women. To a certain extent, Martin shares Dagmar’s beliefs but he is unable to find value in her alternative readings. Ultimately, his is the sterile voice of the wasteland and despite his goodwill he becomes increasingly judgemental.

He also turns out to be the bullseal of Swanhaven who is so busy defending his patch that he fails to read the nature of his litter’s growth. Eventually, the charm of the Fisher King with his associations with death and decay is relinquished rather than banished (Dagmar thanks him for the gift but rejects Coleridge’s The Ancient Mariner with its ‘coils of words’). Instead, a female/feminist voice begins to evolve in defiance of the dead arts. This shift is very interesting given Farmer’s earlier use of Eliot’s work in the novel Alone and in the short stories of Home Time where such texts were paradigmatic. Dagmar writes back:

This is not a black land, this Nullarbor Plain, whatever Martin says, but bronze and amber, copper, a garden of blue and grey-green bushes fading to every skyline: vast and at the same time a dwarf garden where all the plants are stunted, intricate, crouched in each other’s shade around the gnarled shells of low trees. In its rock it harbours the bones of the ancient sea beings, the forebears. They are black opal and burn with the sea fire, blue and green and red, or white opal and milky, mother of pearl.

What are the myths/rules by which we live? The Seal Woman, whose narrative serves as the coda to the novel, refuses to live within the ownership and maintenance of someone else’s story. Dagmar, the woman from the sea, whose gift to the world (to the child of her lover and possible inheritors of her vision) is not resignation but a fable about the refusal to forego responsibility. Dagmar has looked at images of real bodies buried in archeological sites and confronted tales of lopped fingers and drowned men and understands them as distinct from ‘waxworks impressions of so-called horror’.

Her gift to the girl child is honesty: the ability to see and accept, if necessary, an unhappy ending -if the issue is large enough. The child’s father believes in withholding information as protection but also that grown women have to be ‘saved’. The repercussions of this conditioning are evident throughout the text. He is answered by the final coda where the responsibility for one’s own skin is the bottom line. The reader must also consider the point of view that defines this tale as ‘unhappy’.

Early in the narrative, Dagmar encounters two children on the beach. When they ask her about seals she tells them the facts about survival -that when ice-bound they ‘chew edges of hole in encroaching ice until they lose their teeth and drown’. One child does not wish to hear this resolution and clutching his faith in his story of their capacity ‘to share’ he flees, to become, Farmer implies, the adult children who do not learn the truths inherent in the legends of their forbears. Dagmar’s neighbour, Tess, brings her a book of Eskimo stories, some of them very fierce indeed, but it is this story that explains another narrative poem, ‘The Great Silkie of Sule Skerry’. These allusions to creativity, power and resistance resonate in the tapestry of the novel:

Among the Copper Eskimos the shaman descends to the bottom of the sea, or lures the spirit up to a breathing-hole in the floor, and catches her by the wrists with a noose ....

Or, a shaman waits at a hole made in the floor while the assemblage sings the special song until the sea spirit comes riding up on a seal and takes possession of the shaman. She accuses people of breaking tabus, and they confess, while men struggle to keep her from flattening the dance house with ice and letting loose fierce storms.

When the goddess is made ill by men’s sins, the shaman’s task is to ‘comb’ the goddess’s hair. Dagmar asks ‘So why has she no fingers of her own?’ as she investigates a range of creation myths and ancient legends and finds that each narrative has some relevance to the reality of her (and our) present circumstance. Legends of the Norse and Inuit cultures, ghost stories, the Finnish Kalevala and other world mythologies are all fed into the mainstream. While digesting such knowledge Dagmar sits in a park watching a group of Aboriginal people picnicking. She experiences an acute sense of her otherness; her difference, pale against ‘gaudy parked cars’. A child approaches and grins when he is given cherries:

After they packed up and left I looked down at the little bag of twigs and little bloodied teeth I had on my lap, stunned.

A consumer society is captured as economically and deftly as in a Japanese artist’s calligraphy brushstrokes. Farmer knows what to do without.

And so, Dagmar learns to make sense of her own vision. She experiences seasonal change but, like the ‘ice anchors which trap life within and thaw in the sunlight’, she becomes involved in a sea-change. She finds that ‘to live with is not necessarily to know’, that the rituals of existence may mask knowledge, and that love has various colours. In the epigram by Derek Walcott, ‘love is a stone’, but it is also an underwater presence, a source, and in this novel this recurrent image bears looking at. Seasons of light and tenebrousness, the contraries of presence and absence, substance and shadow, surfaces and depth, fire and water are seen in harmony and opposition. (The imported lighthouse is made of basalt – crystallised fire!) Farmer employs symbolism, juxtaposition and counterpoint to allow us to weigh alternatives. Gradually the groundswell of the central narrative becomes a wave that moves the narrator beyond the stasis of her situation. The coda, the seal woman’s fable, then re-sounds depths previously charted by the narrative and culminates in a quite remarkable celebration of quest.

I have emphasised the narrative’s reflections, the other side of the entertaining and engaging love story which is the central text – a curious position for a reviewer – but this leaves Farmer’s story splendidly intact. That is the beauty of this novel. It is a major song in a minor key.