By Carmel Bird
CRIME
The Name of the Sister
Gail Jones
Text, $34.99
A new novel from award-winner Gail Jones is always a cause for celebration. The Name of the Sister is a suspenseful, sombre tale, spun with an unwavering grace, a crime thriller presented in a moody literary tone. It opens with a fleeting scene of modern tragedy shown on a television screen. A man in a war-torn country is weeping beside the ruin of his house where his family lies entombed. Soldiers appear, and it begins to snow. But it is the next news item that provides the material for the novel’s main plot. Here is the story of the appearance of a mute and traumatised woman on a lonely road 30 kilometres outside Broken Hill.
Angie, a freelance journalist, is watching the screen in Sydney, and she is captivated by the image of the silent woman. Her best friend from childhood is Bev, a police officer, and they begin to discuss the case. They have always loved to go into the grim details of life, including the grief of “dark churning thoughts” that “turn in the night like sticky clay, like the cling of the earth itself, like the sightless underground world”.
Events unfold in Sydney and Broken Hill, both of which are vividly brought to life in the text. Two main plots are interwoven. There is the matter of the gradual failure of Angie’s marriage to schoolmaster Sam, alongside her journalistic investigation of the case of the unknown woman on the road, her life “a puzzle waiting to be solved”. Bev is at first reluctant to reveal police details of the case to Angie, but as time goes on, she cannot resist disclosure. They become more or less partners in the investigation, Bev sometimes risking her job in the process.
Many strangers claim the woman as a long-lost relative, and Angie talks to a wide range of these, taking the narrative into the dramas of many other lives. But in fact it is the life of Angie herself, and how the case has the power to influence it, that is the focus of the novel. The reader needs to know the identity of the unknown one, but at the same time is carried deep into the identity of Angie. There is a dark and terrible secret about the death of her father which she reveals to no one.
Author Gail Jones.Credit: Dean Sewell
As a child, Angie was enchanted by the ancient Egyptians and their origin myth in which male ibis Thoth, born from the lips of Ra, the sun god, “laid an egg which contained the world”. He was also, incidentally, the inventor of writing. Angie recalls this childhood fascination when Merle, a Wilyakali woman, tells her the tale of the bronze-wing pigeon, Marnpi, “older than the Great Pyramid of Giza”. This bird was injured and came to rest on what is now known as Broken Hill, forming the shape of the land, and dropping his coloured feathers “which became gold, silver, copper and lead”. The presence of Merle and her Indigenous wisdom breathes into the narrative a human softness and gentleness.
As part of her story on the identity of the unknown woman, Angie visits Berlin, for the life of the stranger has links to the Holocaust. The mystery is resolved and the purpose of the novel’s title is finally revealed.
Between the abjection of the introductory scene on the TV screen and memories of the Holocaust, the narrative contains, as a key part of its design, Angie’s participation in the bloody horror of a confrontation with an armed man in a disused Broken Hill mine.
Her personal search for the meaning behind the mute woman on the lonely road has become a kind of pilgrimage into a hell that lies just beneath the surface. On the way to the mine, she passes through Apollyon Valley and is reminded of the significance of the monster Apollyon in the poem Pilgrim’s Progress. At one point, Bev says to her: “Crime isn’t like literature. It’s not a system of tidy plots and neat correlations.” There is more irony in the statement than she could have imagined.
This is a short novel with a vast reach of history, geography and myth. As it closes, Angie’s true pilgrimage may be just beginning. She has resolved there will be “no more journalism”. She can hear everywhere “the voices of crows”. Her mind is “alive with jitter and riff”. She looks at the sky. The novel is intricate, absorbing, beguiling.
The Booklist is a weekly newsletter for book lovers from Jason Steger. Get it delivered every Friday.