This is, quite simply, a beautiful book. To capture, in 200 pages, the lives of four disparate characters, across a single summer’s day, at Sydney’s iconic Circular Quay, and offer as rich and affecting a story of humanity as this is some achievement. Like the author, all the characters are new to Sydney: one from China, one from Ireland, and two from Jones’ own Western Australia. Theirs are separate backgrounds, but the day’s circumstances draw their narrated experiences together, and the secrets, haunting experiences and travails of their earlier lives are revealed.
As a Sydney-born reader, I am captive to the power of reference in the chosen title. If ever was an iconic Sydney ‘moment’ in literature, it’s always seemed to me that Kenneth Slessor’s ‘Five Bells’ is it. And the author’s quotation in the frontispiece leaves you in no doubt as to its symbolic importance:
Where have you gone? The tide is over you,
The turn of midnight’s water’s over you,
As time is over you, and mystery,
And memory, the flood that does not flow.
This is a novel full of iconic symbolism, not just the Sydney Opera House, Harbour Bridge, the harbour itself, and the famous Quay where white people first colonised Australia. The interrelatedness of separate lives and the ways in which the four stories of past and present are woven in the day’s events as a kind of psychohistory and psychogeography (think of Joyce’s Stephen Hero, or Woolf ’s Mrs Dalloway) form a satisfying, compelling narrative.
Themes of memory (and forgetting) reverberate through Jones’ work. As she did in Sorry and Dreams of Speaking, small, intimate, private lives are connected in Five Bells to a larger, universal narrative. The tiny world of Pei Xing, living out her life quietly in suburban Bankstown, is connected, through her tragic family past as a victim of China’s Cultural Revolution, to the great movements in world history. Similarly, echoes of the Irish diaspora are there in the story of Catherine, living in solitary hope, a world away from the Dublin where she lost a beloved brother. Ellie and James, childhood lovers on the other side of the continent, reconnect on this fateful Saturday, but their connection is now as irrevocably fractured as it was cemented then.
Slessor’s ‘Five Bells’ is justly acclaimed as an elegy of enormous power, about place and its spirit (John Olsen’s enormous mural in the northern foyer of the Opera House is called ‘Salute to Five Bells’). Memory, the sense of loss, and the painful connection between past and present are so brilliantly and immediately brought to life in Gail Jones’ Five Bells that it deserves to share the illustrious title.
David Gaunt is the co-owner of Gleebooks and recipient of the Member (AM) in the General Division of the Order of Australia in the Australia Day Honours 2011. This review first appeared in the Summer 2010/11 issue of Bookseller+Publisher.
Annie Proulx, author of The Shipping News and Brokeback Mountain, has turned to literary nonfiction to write the memoir 
Secrets to the Grave
Peter Robb’s new book reminds me of a kaleidoscope. Turn the barrel, or page, and a new, mesmerising image, fact, opinion or event reveals itself, leading the reader to re-think the intricacies, contradictions, beauty and barbarity of the history of the challenging city of Naples. The book’s subtitle is ‘A book of Art and Insurrection’ but that does not do justice to the breadth and depth of Robb’s command of his subject.
Anybody who reads this book and isn’t instantly a fan probably wasn’t paying close enough attention. Rocks in the Belly is both a masterpiece and a very challenging piece of writing—both to read and to do justice to in a review. The reader is introduced to a nameless young man—the neglected only child of a serial foster mother. Haunted by a terrible secret in his past, he returns home to confront the dying mother he feels never loved and understood him. The story is written from two perspectives: from the eight-year-old boy who felt pushed aside and who acted up in order to gain his mother’s attention; and the 28-year-old man who is caring for his terminally ill mother. Not only is it interesting the way Bauer chooses to flout the traditional stereotype of the spoilt only child, also intriguing is the way he takes the most basic character relationship, that of the mother and son, and turns it on its head. By reversing their roles, the protagonist is given the chance to reciprocate his mother’s treatment of him in his childhood. With this beautiful novel, Bauer teaches us the meaning of ‘too little too late’, with an ending that is sure to bring a tear to even the most stoic reader’s eye.
Fans of Graeme Base’s intricate picture books will be pleased to know that his latest is just as gorgeously detailed as Animalia and The Eleventh Hour. The Legend of The Golden Snail follows the intrepid Wilbur (and his trusty cat) as they set off on the trail of a mollusc that has been transformed into an enormous galleon, ‘a snailing ship’, and banished to the Ends of the Earth by a Grand Enchanter. Bases’ illustrations are as big, bright and beautiful as ever, and young readers (ages four to eight) will be enchanted to see the weird and wonderful creatures that Wilbur encounters on his trip, including a crab the size of an island and earwig pirates aboard a ‘bulbous bottle boat’ trying to harness the lighbulbs of the unfortunate lantern fish. Adults too will enjoy reading out loud the alliterative prose, the ‘maze of madness’, ‘slithering sea’ and ‘dreadful doldrums’. There is a simple moral in the narrative: all the animals that Wilbur helps out along the way end up repaying his kindness when he runs into strife. As for the fate of the Golden Snail, well there is a twist there as well.
Lucy Jarrett returns home to upstate New York from Japan, only to find herself haunted by her father’s unresolved death a decade ago in Kim Edwards’ novel 
Mr Tripp—go to the top of the class! 
Awakened