Fiction: Following the success of Sixty Lights, Gail Jones's latest novel, Dream of Speaking, is both determinedly cerebral and emotionally alive, writes Eileen Battersby
Alice Black is young, single, melancholy and conscious of having read far too many books. "She spent her days inward-turned, reading and writing." She inhabits a space firmly patrolled by memories and moments of heightened understanding. There is a remote, detached quality about her; her responses are intense, highly cerebral and charged with a surreal clarity. "It felt like space walking. It felt like a suspension of the rarest kind, and she saw herself a floaty astronaut, strung in airless dark, supernatural, abstract, buoyed on who-knows-what force to dangle heroically meaningless."
Given to close examination of the world about her, Alice emerges as a study in sorrow.
As the novel opens, Alice has returned home to Australia, having been in Paris and Japan. The three contrasting settings suit her state of mind. Dreams of Speaking is the second novel from Australian Gail Jones. It is an austere performance; sophisticated and thoughtful and intent on articulating the near physical sensation of psychological displacement.
Written in a precise third-person voice, it is deliberate and low-key, if fraught. The language is formal and weighted with purpose. If there is an influence at work, it could well be that of Milan Kundera - there are certainly echoes of his later novels in which meditation supplants conventional plot. Jones, while obviously interested in Alice's passage towards understanding, is also drawn to plot. The theme of sleepwalking is well conveyed. An entire human psyche has been laid bare, albeit impressionistically; not brutally but with unnerving clarity.
Alice is in flight, but she is also searching. The psychological felt nature of this novel demands close reading. Living inside Alice's head is interesting because she is constantly thinking thoughts that are random but always exact. The text is literary, at times wordy, as is Alice, who intellectualises life and is given to making statements such as "I was snatched by the wind" or, writing to her sister, "I think my project folly and am struck every day by the profundity of orders of experience and sensation that are unconnected to my vainglorious jottings".
Jones has created a central preoccupied character who is undergoing a controlled free fall. It is as if Alice is taking numbered steps. Yet neither she nor the novel is particularly cold, merely distanced.
In order to illustrate this detachment, Jones provides Alice with a lover, Stephen, whom she no longer wants. Desperate, needy Stephen is probably the only unconvincing element in the story. "His distress was like clothing; it enveloped him, it altered his shape." Luckily for Alice, and the narrative, he abandons his hopeless pursuit and returns home to Australia.
Her relationship with Stephen never appears to have acquired the complexity of the one she shares with her younger sister, Norah, whose name she had always coveted. As the narrative unfolds, even this impulse gains an eerie relevance. Nothing is left to chance in Dreams of Speaking, every gesture is relevant.
The use of "gesture" is interesting as the narrative is deeply cinematic and through this quality Jones repeatedly confers cohesion on the narrative. Alice's bond with her sister evolves over years and through shared experiences and points of reference. In contrast is the profound friendship she makes with an elderly Japanese man whom she meets by chance while they are both travelling on the Paris metro. As Alice becomes aware of John Lennon's voice, "posthumous and unearthly", the Japanese man identifies the song and adds: "I was once in love with Yoko Ono." Mr Sakamoto is writing a book about Alexander Graham Bell. This discovery delights Alice, who then explains her project: "I am writing a book - trying to write a book - about modern things." The old man decides "we must be friends".
It is their friendship, open and mutually rewarding, which balances the wary love shared between the sisters. The arrival of Mr Sakamoto also gives Jones an opportunity to liberate the narrative and include some fascinating asides and historical facts.
An original and disciplined intelligence informs the novel. Jones's previous novel, Sixty Lights, was longlisted for the 2004 Man Booker Prize and is also on the longlist for this year's International Impac Dublin Literary Award. That earlier novel is a beautiful period piece in which a young girl relives the short tragic life of her young mother. Sixty Lights begins with a dramatic image of the death of a man falling from a height while carrying a large sheet of glass. In this new book, less graceful but as assured as its beguiling predecessor, Alice witnesses a horrific beating and later sees the dead body of a youth for whom she had created a fantasy identity.
Alice is a romantic suspended between fantasy and reality, hope and loss. Her story is not a romance. Death does shape the narrative and there is a great deal of realism, yet it is a dreamer's book. In Alice, Jones offers a self-contained loner driven by the desire to overcome a range of unsettling sensations. While Sixty Lights suggested that Jones had a feel for atmosphere comparable to that of her countryman, Peter Carey, Dreams of Speaking is different, not as visually or imaginatively striking, yet always real.
It underlines the ways in which sensation and memory, as a random succession of images, evokes experience. Most of all, Jones has attempted and succeeded in writing a work that is both determinedly cerebral and emotionally alive.
Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times
Dreams of Speaking. By Gail Jones, Harvill Secker, 213pp. £14.99