The power and intensity of love

Fiction: It happened in India. One day a worker "had been climbing the bamboo scaffolding of one of the high colonial buildings, with a large mirror bound to his body by a piece of cloth".

The man is confident, climbs higher and higher. But then something goes wrong and he falls through the air. Unable to release himself from the mirror, he "clutched at it as though it was a magic carpet" and "landed in the midst of its utter shattering, and was speared through the chest". It is but one of many dazzling images in this oddly hypnotic period narrative by the Australian writer, Gail Jones.

Sixty Lights is shaped by the power and intensity of love. It is about lamenting the past and fearing the future. It follows the trials of a handful of sympathetic, somewhat wounded people. Death stalks the narrative with a relentlessness that at times threatens to overpower the book, were Jones not quite as fine and deliberate a writer.

The central character is Lucy, a young girl who barely lives long enough to become a young woman. She is a visionary whose visions are largely created by the experience of witnessing the loss of her young mother in child birth, a tragedy compounded by the slow suicide by poison of her distraught father.

Lucy is eight and her elder brother, Tom, "aged almost ten" in 1860 when their odyssey effectively begins in Australia with the double tragedy. Jones spins her elaborate, winsome story with breathtaking grace and immense skill. Just when it seems the children might well be destined for a happy-ever-after resolution by living with their adoring paternal grandfather, reality intervenes. They are despatched to England to live with their mother's brother, Uncle Neville, far from a saint, but not fully a rogue.

Jones sets out to evoke the Victorian world of Charles Dickens, whose work features in the book and certainly informs the consciousness of the characters. It is also an age of discovery, science has begun to assert itself and for Lucy, science is manifest in the mysteries and possibilities of photography. Throughout the novel there is a clear sense of Lucy and her dead mother as kindred spirits, young girls possessed of an urgent capacity for love and romance, and also for wonder at life.

There are differences in their respective plights. Whereas a chance encounter for her mother presents her with a chance of love, albeit short lived as disaster intervenes, Lucy en route for an arranged marriage in India, mistakes the behaviour of a bored fellow passenger for lasting romance and is humiliated. Many things occur, as Lucy sets out quite unintentionally to mirror the passion of her mother, she is often hurt yet always interested.

Meanwhile, brother Tom, having suffered loss and experienced pain, meets up with a little wife who could well have tripped from the pages of Dickens.

True to the narrative devices of the great English novelist, Jones makes use of coincidence as well as the ways in which characters learn to be thankful for the small joys of the moment. Even broader, however, than the influence of Dickens, is the presence of Jones's fellow Australian, Peter Carey, whose fascination with minutiae, and the ways in which things work, as well as his formal tone, linger throughout the book.

It is an unusual novel of subtle appeal. Few heroines are as doomed or as resilient as Lucy. For all the blackness of the story - such as when Lucy, heading for Bombay and in the throws of her disastrous shipboard romance, sees something that with hindsight she identifies as an ill omen: "On the deck a group of three gentlemen caught albatrosses with hooks and lines, pulling them screeching and crying from the open sky, and then gave them - five in all - to the assisting sailors. The sailors cut off the birds' feet, stuffed them with bran to begin a process of drying, then created from these grisly relics small purses and pouches for tobacco" - there is also humour. Intent on keeping touch with their dead mother, Lucy and Tom, under the guidance of Uncle Neville, seek out clairvoyants. Thus Tom writes to Lucy, "Uncle Neville continues to search for our mother and has found a new medium, one he considers superior to Madame d'Esperance. The new woman, Madame Noir, is dark and possibly gypsy, and Neville believes that this alone recommends her and makes her more spiritually competent."

Recently longlisted for the Man Booker Prize, Sixty Lights is engaging, rather beautiful and even at its most magical, succeeds in being both believable and as compelling as the many images Lucy's gloriously alive mind suspends in time.

Sixty Lights By Gail Jones Harvill, 249pp. £14.99

Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times