The novel deploys multiple voices from both the present and the past. Jones focalises the present-day story mainly through the third-person narration of Sydney-based sisters, newly widowed Frances and her older sister, Nell. They have been brought up by their grandparents in Kalgoorlie after the death of their mother, Mary, and the disappearance of their father, Jack. The narratives of Fred and Else Kelly (the grandparents whose surname the girls adopt) are threaded throughout, often in contrapuntal telling of the same event. Else’s versions of events are told in Joycean poetic form, whereas Fred’s war memories – which hark back to his experience as a Japanese prisoner of war amid a culture of masculinity and ‘strenuous forgetting’ – finally emerge in a rush of recall. Else’s self-awareness, despite her failing memory, is expressed in snippets of her former feisty self: she wittily refers to herself as Someone Else and Elsewhere.

Gail Jones (photograph by Heike Steinweg/Penguin)

The narrative’s slow excavation of the past is reinforced by Jones’s use of past-tense narration and repeated use of retrospective phrases such as ‘s/he remembered’ or ‘what returned to her’. The retrieval of repressed memories works on both an individual level and, more allegorically, at the level of the nation. In this way, family histories and national histories are closely linked to ideas of hidden shame, loss, and pain. This unearthing of buried memories is reminiscent of Jones’s novel Sorry (2007), where the narrative method and the theme were, similarly, intricately intertwined.

Entangled with these fictionalised family stories are those of historical figures whose lives are reimagined in the novel (a technique Jones explored earlier in her short story collection Fetish Lives [1997]). One of these is Paddy Hannan, an Irish gold prospector escaping the Great Hunger to make a new life in Australia, who, with two other Irish migrants, ‘discovered’ gold in the West Australian goldfields and started the gold rush around Kalgoorlie. As Jones notes at the end of the book, she has respected the ‘shape of Hannan’s life’ but has written a ‘fictive version’ of it. Details, such as the statue of Paddy Hannan that remains to this day in Kalgoorlie, are used to explore the idea of historical legacy and fame. It is clear from the notes at the end, too, that both mining and Kalgoorlie have personal reverberations for Jones: ‘I trust I have honoured, in some small way, the lives of my father and grandfather and the generations who endured the labour of underground mining.’

There are a number of striking images that recur throughout, some of them relating to the idea of scale, one of the thematic threads of the novel. The Kalgoorlie mine’s ‘hellish’ Super Pit, for example, shows the huge and enduring impact of extractive industries on the landscape, leaving humans ‘rescaled’. Similarly, Hokusai’s painting The Great Wave, which hangs in the sisters’ childhood bedroom, represents the power of the natural world and the frailty of humanity, denoted by the artist’s aesthetic use of scale. Frances’s memory of Hokusai’s depiction of the tiny ‘bubble heads’ of people in the fragile boats dwarfed by an enormous wave recalls her own childhood experience of an allergic reaction to a bee sting when her own head was massively swollen, out of scale with the rest of her body.

As in many of Jones’s novels, the ‘books of childhood’ assume significance. The sisters’ obsession with the ocean and with Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea provides them with a particular sentence to which they keep returning, even as adults, and which, as Frances suggests, ‘held premonitions of what would help in the future’. This magical thinking lays emphasis on a totemic belief in words and in reading itself.

It is not until the second part of the novel, when Frances returns to Kalgoorlie, that an Indigenous perspective emerges. Part of the novel’s reckoning with the past is encapsulated in the relationship that develops between Frances and Val (whose real name is Ngulyi), a Mandildjara woman from the Martu community who was taken from her parents and sent to live with a white family in Kalgoorlie. A close childhood friend of Frances’s mother, she now acts as companion to Frances’s embittered Aunt Enid, who still lives in the family’s old house in Kalgoorlie. Val takes Frances on a road trip to Lake Ballard to help her come to terms with her ‘sorry time’ after Else’s death, gradually introducing her to the Aboriginal languages that Val is helping to recover, and educating Frances in a ‘new frame of [Indigenous] knowledge’. It is during this journey that Frances starts to come to terms with ‘the secret history of her own life, the untold inner story’.

In addition to the novel’s narration of past and present, Jones uses the future conditional tense (‘there would be’, ‘she would’) to denote a prediction of a future that is yet to emerge – ‘things known and foreknown’. A sense of time that has patterns repeating across generations could be regarded as fatalistic, but in this novel, as in much of Jones’s work, the idea of hope emerges from the shadows of the past. This optimism is given specificity in the story of Modesto Varischetti, the so-called ‘entombed miner’ (another of Jones’s real-life characters given fictional treatment here), with whom Frances has always had a secret fascination. His rescue from the depths of a mine, after being trapped underground by floods in 1907, seems to represent a resurrection, or, as the narration suggests, ‘the dawning of a frail, provisional faith’ for Frances. Juxtaposed with this historical image of recovery is the more recent example in the novel of the Thai boys’ soccer team who were ultimately brought out from the shadowy depths of the Tham Luang cave. New life is shown to appear from underground in nature too: cicadas reborn from below and shrimps from under Lake Ballard’s salt crust.

In an interview with Breandáin O’Shea on the Tall Poppies podcast, Jones described writing as a ‘mechanism to deal with loss’. This novel brilliantly and lyrically conveys the ways in which the past continues to haunt the present and to cast long shadows into the future, while still offering the possibility of hope for reconciliation, both individual and national.