Devotion primarily tells the entwined stories of Hanne Nussbaum and Thea Eichenwald, who live in the Prussian village of Kay in 1836. Through the reflective dreaminess of Hanne’s first-person voice, the reader becomes aware of her position on the margins of her closed religious community, where Hanne balances her love for family and tradition with the call of another kind of life, as yet hard to define, another way of understanding herself and the world. While the novel suggests the ecstatic possibilities of religious devotion, epitomised in the hymns that soar throughout Hanne’s life, she finds herself more attuned to the nuanced language of the trees and the wind and the intriguing beauty of her new friend Thea. As they move into their young womanhood, the braidings between Hanne and Thea deepen, even without the social structures in which to fully express it.

Hannah Kent (photograph via Pan Macmillan Australia)

Kent is tilling familiar ground; as in her earlier novels, Burial Rites (2013) and The Good People (2016), she is focused on the experience of women who are on a social periphery, and whose deep feeling and independence bring them into conflict with prevailing norms. In addition, all three novels, set in the first half of the nineteenth century, are redolent with the textures and scents of a certain kind of elemental life, suffused with mud, wood smoke, the muck of animals, salt water, and the sweat of unwashed human bodies. Kent conjures a raw edge of human experience, close to both beauty and the fracturings of violence.

Hanne and Thea’s community are Old Lutherans, now marginalised by the edicts of a reformist Union church. As a persecuted religious minority, the elders decide to take the community on the perilous journey to the new world of South Australia, leading to an excruciating six-month journey aboard the crowded, disease-ridden Kristi. The gruesome conditions on the immigrant ship echo those in Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace (1996): families struggle in darkened holds, the girls reach for each other in the wildness of storms, and the community experiences the trauma of loved ones being buried at sea, including the shock of the ‘sailor’s stitch’ threaded posthumously through the membrane of a nose. In recounting this journey, Kent draws on the history of Prussian immigration to the town of Hahndorf in the Adelaide Hills; like Atwood, and as in her previous novels, Kent builds explicitly on stories and histories of the past, using them as fabric from which to devise her own ruminations on the richness of human experience.

The second half of the novel unfolds in the unfamiliarity of the new world, where heat, rain, and existing inhabitants momentarily challenge the pilgrims’ drive to recreate the old world, to build ‘Heiligendorf’ in the hills and valleys of this new ‘paradise’. Nevertheless, beliefs still clash, tensions erupt, there are still different ways of interpreting meaning in the world – even as the settlers establish themselves and new children arrive. For example, as a midwife with knowledge that lies outside a strict Lutheran orthodoxy, Thea’s mother is always under suspicion, her ability to heal the sick, to suture the gash between the living and the dead, seen as morally and spiritually dangerous.

The themes of immigration and colonisation provide an important context for the novel, both in terms of understanding the complicity of the position of the settler Australian and the immigrant’s tensions between the call of a previous life and the possibility of somewhere new. However, through its poetic focus on Hanne and Thea’s deepening love and its tenacity in the face of misrecognition and separation, Devotion is also an intensely embodied reflection on the nature of love itself: what is it that draws one person to another? When is devotion about steadfastness, a focus on the loved one, and when might it hold on too tight or for too long?

In its concerns about the impact of the past, Devotion is also a rewriting of the ghost story and of what it might mean to be haunted. Rather than being something that is fearful, Hanne’s narrative suggests that the persistence of the ghost is itself an enactment of love, a devoted return to bardo-like haunts of familiarity where meanings continue to be made. Drawn to the body and presence of the loved person and the viscerality of places once inhabited, the ghost signifies what remains, an acknowledgment of the inevitable carrying forward of the intensity of connection. Perhaps what Devotion tells us most is that love is never finished but will, somehow, always find a way to speak – in the embroideries of words and stories, the quiet rustling of the wind through strange and familiar trees, even the eerie song of the whale that Hanne hears while she is on the ship, resounding through the hidden chambers of the deepest ocean.