Gail Jones (photograph by Heike Steinweg/Penguin)

A number of themes, tropes, and formal qualities reappear across Jones’s oeuvre – her two short story collections, her novels (six to date, with another soon to be published), her non-fiction essays, and her 2007 monograph (on the film The Piano). By choosing to structure her book in terms of such aspects and motifs that form its five chapters – weather, time, reading and writing, image, and modernity – rather than chronologically text by text, Dalziell is able to highlight particular works that seem most appropriate to each topic and to return to them again in different contexts. This enables productive comparative insights across Jones’s body of work, although there are times when this approach becomes somewhat pedestrian: for example, the rather flat statement, ‘Alice Black in Dreams of Speaking (2006) also experiences snow.’ Overall, though, Dalziell is a savvy and sensitive reader who is alert to the poetic rhythms and cadences of Jones’s work as well as to its overarching ideas.

The introduction offers a chronological overview and plot summary of Jones’s work, including a summary of the critical field. I was, at first glance, rather sceptical about Dalziell’s decision to begin this full-length study with the topic of ‘weather’, not seemingly the works’ most striking feature. However, I was won over by the rich analysis offered by this angle on Sorry (2007) and A Guide to Berlin (2015). Dalziell’s discussion of the snow globe as a trope, linked to the philosophical works of Benjamin and Adorno, illuminates the ‘meteorological thinking’ of Jones’s characters as well as the ethical and allegorically charged implications of snow as image. While Dalziell draws attention throughout to Jones’s strongly ethical and philosophical thought, she is careful to demonstrate Jones’s reluctance to oversimplify or provide neat solutions. Jones herself refers to this as ‘ethical hesitation’; Dalziell uses the term ‘ethical hesitancy’.

As Dalziell makes clear throughout, all of Jones’s work engages in some way with an ethical awareness of acts of reading and writing, including her own. Her characters are themselves often writers, artists, philosophers, or would-be creatives whose inner and outer lives are staged within the narratives and who are grappling with issues of representation, as is Jones herself.

Perhaps because Jones’s work is so intimately caught up in an ethical awareness of its own writing and reading practices, particularly in relation to communities of writers across time and place, I especially enjoyed the chapter entitled ‘Reading and Writing’. Dalziell helpfully suggests that the literariness of Jones’s novels is not just self-reflexive but an ethical act, ‘tested in the imaginative worlds’ of the books. She provides a convincing argument for the way Jones uses fragments from and references to other writers and genres as a way of ‘thinking through literary ethics’ and of reflecting on her own reading. A good example of this is Jones’s deployment of Vladimir Nabokov’s speak-memory technique (taken from his autobiographical memoir of that name) in A Guide to Berlin, which is used both as theme and form. While the characters’ desire for Nabokovian ‘literary fellowship’ is shown to end in disappointment and betrayal – particularly for one of the characters, Cass – Dalziell suggests that the narrative itself counter balances this loss of faith in books and reading by its incantation of Berlin S-Bahn station names (in Jones’s words, ‘So like a poem’) that performs an aesthetic transformation of the quotidian into poetry. In this way, Jones’s narrator asserts a certain belief in literary art contra her character’s own disenchantment with it.

While reading may be represented as transformative, Dalziell points out that Jones’s texts consider both ‘the pleasures and perils of writing’. This is particularly well illustrated in Dalziell’s commentary on Black Mirror (2002), where the biographer, Anna, comes up against the unknowability of the life of another and the ethical challenges this genre poses. Dalziell’s analysis is finely tuned to Jones’s refusal to settle for easy answers either in narrative form or in representing her characters’ inner lives.

Likewise, Dalziell is alert to Jones’s questioning of the ‘representational possibilities and limitations’ of images. She quotes Jones here: ‘I began as a painter: in everything I’ve written, there are images and words in contention.’ While images in Jones’s writing – particularly in the form of photography and art – can form ‘connective ties’ between characters, there are, Dalziell suggests, ‘limits to the ethics they may be asked to enact’. In her final thematic chapter, Dalziell illustrates Jones’s representation of modernity across her novels as demonstrating its contradictory engagement with the senses. Dalziell’s conclusion cannily analyses the ‘inconclusive’ and ‘reluctant’ endings of Jones’s texts, allowing her to similarly refuse a ‘definitive account’ or ‘final word’ on the writer.

It is a mark of a readerly text that one critic’s analysis is never quite enough to account for one’s own reading or the text’s complexities. And so it is with Jones’s richly layered writing, as Dalziell anticipates. But Dalziell’s insights made me want to return to the less-familiar texts and reread them with her key concepts in mind, and the imminent publication (in October 2020) of Jones’s next novel, Our Shadows, will provide a welcome new opportunity to do just this.