Lost in Black and White

It’s thrilling to watch the leaps a literary imagination can make. Long-listed for the Man Booker Prize, Gail Jones’ 2004 novel Sixty Lights was partly inspired by the life of pioneering 19th century photographer Julia Margaret Cameron, etching the story of Lucy Strange in 60 short-chapter “exposures” with the vividness of an exploding flashbulb.

“The photograph should appear… as if God had breathed it onto the glass,” Lucy writes. Jones’ breathless wonderment at the machines of modernity was next parlayed into her third novel Dreams of Speaking (2006), where academic heroine Alice is literally lost in Wonderland as she ponders “those things wired, lit, automatic and swift”—from space travel and cinema to Hedy Lamarr’s invention of a radio-controlled torpedo and the horror of Hiroshima.

Now, as Dreams of Speaking looms as a literary dark horse for next month’s Miles Franklin Award (favorites include Peter Carey’s Theft and Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria), comes the Perth-based writer’s Sorry (Vintage; 218 pages). Just as Sixty Lights segued seamlessly into Dreams, this pained, poetic tale of a young girl wracked by dreams of speaking seems to have been born from its predecessor. “We take it for granted, don’t we?” muses 12-year-old Perdita Keene, a free spirit made mute by the violent death of her English anthropologist father near Broome, Western Australia, in World War II. “The inspiration and expiration that presses the vocal folds, the movement of air from the trachea, the vibration of the voice box, the issuing—unthinking, automatic—of air released into the mouth and fashioned by the tongue and the lips, emerging then as socially efficient speech.”

Slipping between first and third person (“This is a story that can only be told in a whisper,” Jones’ narrator begins), this finely calibrated novel gives voice to a girl’s tentative coming of age. But just as powerfully, it addresses the dilemma of inhabiting, spiritually as well as spatially, the vast continent of Australia. The daughter of Shakespeare-obsessed Stella, and named after Hermione’s abandoned daughter from The Winter’s Tale, Perdita can’t reconcile the vast Outback landscape of her childhood with the transported English culture of her schooling—”all this life, all this huge unelaborated life, told her there was more on heaven and earth than was dreamt of by Mister Shakespeare.” Neglected by her self-absorbed parents, Perdita befriends the family’s Aboriginal servant Mary and a different education begins. Perdita learns to read “the chevron sand-lines of lizards… The ripples of departed snakes, the scroll shapes and mounds and pathways of bush tucker—all that had been inscribed there before them, in a hidden language never noticed, became suddenly visible.” Mary, in turn, is absorbed into Perdita’s world of books, finding sanctuary under “the roof-shaped protection of open volumes.”

But Jones is quick to shatter this glasshouse of cultural cross-pollination. When Mary becomes the scapegoat following the murder of Perdita’s father and is banished to reform school in Perth, Sorry begins to articulate the deep unease of a family faced with the unfinished business of history. And it is around the grisly events that took place in the kitchen of the Keenes’ cattle- station shack that the novel cinematically circles.

Later, Stella will descend into misanthropic madness in a Perth boarding house, while Perdita, starved of her sisterhood with Mary, will seek out “the families of readership” as a trainee librarian. With a mastery of mise-en-scne, Jones writes of the family’s future as if it were the past, and the past as if it were the present. For the surviving members, what happened in the station’s kitchen continues to play out, not unlike the true-life case of a Japanese soldier lost for 29 years in the Philippines jungles, who refused to believe World War II had ended. “When I heard this story as an adult I felt I understood Hiroo Onada,” Perdita recounts. “It was possible that someone might carry a war inside them, and that isolation might go on, and on, and on.”

In a note accompanying Sorry, Jones refers to the 1997 Human Rights Commission report that recorded the removal of thousands of indigenous children from their families, and to Australian Prime Minister John Howard’s refusal to apologize for the actions of previous governments. In a novel of such resonance and restraint, this epilogue strikes the sole forced note. For Australian readers, at least, the title carries enough emotional weight to speak volumes, and Jones is too subtle and cerebral a writer to suggest a polemical reading of her text. Instead, Sorry is most eloquent expressing a more singular kind of sorrow, while suggesting why the simplest utterances are often the hardest.