Although it has a sketchy modern-day framing narrative, Love in the Years of Lunacy is set during World War II, in Sydney, and then in New Guinea. Sayer has taken her experience of the Kings Cross music scene, moved it back a few decades, and coated it with sugar. Pearl and her twin brother, seventeen-year-old saxophonists, play lucrative gigs at the Trocadero ballroom, but keep up with the latest jazz trends by frequenting clubs where they jam with the black GIs who have recently arrived in Sydney. One night Pearl meets James Washington, a sax player who has played with Benny Goodman’s orchestra. The ensuing romance is straight out of Mills & Boon. The stern, flawless, noble older man takes the young woman in hand and patiently teaches her about music and life, having first deflowered her in the Luna Park ghost train during an air raid: ‘Folks back home told me about Aussie girls, but I never thought I’d find myself one as gorgeous as you. Prettiest package I ever seen,’ he tells her afterwards. It may be just a contemporary prejudice, but there is something a bit creepy, as well as hackneyed, about all this. Despite the unconventional setting – the family lives a bohemian (though not dysfunctional) life near Kings Cross – the first hundred pages feel as though they were written on automatic pilot.

When James is shipped out and their romance seems doomed, Pearl tries to take the easy way out but ends up in the care of the Master of Lunacy. The introduction of Hector Best lifts the novel suddenly out of its commonplace rut and demonstrates that Sayer is still capable of writing compelling prose:

The Master of Lunacy had a part in the middle of his straight, ash-coloured hair. When he leaned forward to take Pearl’s pulse she noticed the pale translucent line of his scalp … When she opened her eyes she didn’t smile with relief; she stared at the ceiling, opened her mouth and screamed – not because she was scared, mind you, but because she was still alive.

Later, ‘it was as if her true feelings were the subject of an examination for which she hadn’t studied’. This slightly stilted language works well here, conveying the surreal state of Pearl’s consciousness; at other times, the formality of some of the expressions just sounds wooden. (The narrator comments, straight-faced, that the doctor believes her deaf grandmother’s ‘head movements were coincidental rather than genuine responses to auditory stimuli’, a strange intrusion into a standard comic ‘meet the family’ scene, which is puzzling rather than playful.)

But the Master of Lunacy (who might owe something to Rodney Hall’s Love Without Hope [2007]) soon becomes just another stock character of romantic fiction: the fussy, ineffectual admirer whom the heroine almost marries because he is dependable. Pearl’s plan to avoid this marriage, which is clearly doomed to failure, is melodramatic and improbable, and we are plunged into another formulaic genre, the Boy’s Own war story. Pearl manages to impersonate her brother and survive the grim horrors of the war in New Guinea, pursuing James in a quixotic quest which comes to an explosive climax, before the novel concludes with further shocking revelations in the coda.

This jumble of genres could have added up to a postmodern jeu d’esprit, offering a metafictional critique of conventional heroism with a parody of stereotypes and a pastiche of plot elements. But there is no indication of any ironic distance between the author and her material. Even the framing narrative – a brief prologue, intermissions, and coda in the voice of Pearl’s nephew, a writer who is basing a novel on the audiotapes she recorded before she died – is flimsy and drops completely out of sight during the main narrative.

Sayer knows her background material well. Her grasp of the vernacular of jazz music is convincing, and she has done thorough research on wartime Sydney and the campaign against the Japanese in New Guinea. The problem is that she hasn’t transformed this promising material into either a compelling, absorbing narrative or the original, po-mo work of art that her title leads one to expect. In her acknowledgments, Sayer admits that the novel took her more than ten years to write. This confirms my belief that the time and effort put into a work of art are no guarantees of its success.