The Color of the Sky is, on the whole, an extremely self-conscious work of art. But before elaborating that side of Cowan ‘s achievement, I feel compelled to cavil at the roles played by Leon, the narrator of most of the story. While at times Leon seems self-evidently caught in the writer’s ironic stare, often his attitudes are endorsed. If that is the case, I worry about the ceaseless, almost pornographic reduction of all the women in the novel (including those not in his own narrative) to a relentless exposition (and exposure) of breasts and thighs.

We are told three times about Annette’s small breasts, twice about Ellen’s large ones; hips and buttocks (but only female ones) loom frequently. This may be part of Leon’s particular crime fiction fantasy – but I doubt it. This aspect of The Color of the Sky makes it almost a textbook example of a cultural artefact that turns women into objects of the consumer’s gaze; there is no space allowed for female reader.

The same problem occurs, on a lesser moral scale, with some of Leon’s more banal, supposedly portentous exchanges with Annette:

… Why did you come here?

I’m not sure. I was looking for some answers, I suppose.

She turned the horse away. It seemed to have some inbuilt mechanism to follow cattle. She said: You might find some questions.

The narrative-as-search is in fact almost parodied by Cowan, partly through an elaborate splicing of nineteenth and twentieth-century genres and themes. Leon would really rather be in a nineteenth-century novel, a genre he loves to teach, than in a twentieth-century, story about corruption and decay. He would rather play the omniscient nineteenth-century authorial role than become an actor in a, tawdry narrative. The nineteenth century is present through references to Dickens, to ‘Gladstone in the London area ‘where Ellen lives,’ through Leon’s desire to write a thesis on Wilkie Collins and the beginnings of the crime novel and, perhaps most importantly, in the broken narrative of Tom’s exploration of the desert. All this is set against Annette’s contemporary crime novel, which she both lives out and wants Leon to write with her. Leon’s interest in Westerns shifts his focus from Australian settings to American ones, although that changes somewhat in the course of the story.

This is not a simple case of valuing one narrative convention over another (opposing realities are not in question in such a literary exploration). The formlessness of oral history, of mere reminiscence, is rejected with the rejection of Leon’s’ talks with Walter:

Some of what he said of early journeys out from the coast was sharp and real. But I was But I was uneasy with it, all a bit much like what more and more passes now for history, oral reminiscences lovingly gathered on ape by post-graduate students from characters who had been yard spinners and raconteurs all their lives and found the truth far too stark. Not that Walter was elaborating, that was unfair, rather that it was all too elusive.

The past – represented by an imaginative re-creation, extracts from an explorer’s journal, and letters – is slippery: ‘I could not tell pursuing the faded script if it was factual or ironic’, thinks Leon, scanning a letter ‘probably from a grandmother’. It is, I think, clear that Leon in particular is scared of the raw past:

I think I’m tired of it. The past seems pretty much a series of set-pieces if you get looking for it. Cliches. A touch of Melodrama. I think I prefer novels.

Your novels reflect the cliches, surely. Sorry, memories of my academic period.

Yes. But they’re more manageable, perhaps.

Never believe that, she said. What my history tutors could manage was unreal. The real unreal.

I wasn’t looking for history. Just a kind of family vista.

The family vista is there, in The Color of the Sky, but it is hedged about with the mystery that is at the heart of narrative explanation: ‘The everyday accounts of lives long past were in some ways clear, but it was a clarity that concealed, relying on a key of understanding that did not have to be stated.’ That sentence could stand as a description of the effect of the novel as a whole.

In the end, after a fantasy of betrayal, Leon simply steps out of the story – out of a series of possible stories. In the interim, he is vouchsafed a glimpse of the true sky on a trip into the bush with Annette which mocks the journeys of the explorers. It is worth quoting in full because it again demonstrates the great difficulty, I have in decoding the tone of the novel:

I thought about what she said, and about the extraordinary stars clear now through the boughs and broken spaces between the trees. And I had never seen them until now, never seen their strange pattern of light. Looking up there was nothing else. Solid, something I might have stepped away into. Out of this blackness there had once been the shape of familiar things. Everyman his own spaceship. His own Carl Sagan. It was all there, of course, not in the Victorian novels, since the Victorians had a few material disadvantages, including fogging up the sky as much as possible. Give or take Thomas Hardy. But when the writers got out to the benighted colonies, they were star struck. Now it was star wars. None of which, though we had done our best, diminished what I was looking at. Or not from here.

The cliches and insights jostle together in an unsettling fashion. The Color of the Sky requires considerable skill and patience on the part of the reader, who is forced to play the role of an interpreter from under whose feet the rug has already been pulled.