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The Australian

The Name of the Sister by Gail Jones book review: this is a fractious, Jekyll-and-Hyde kind of creature

In the early 2000s, I snuck into one of Gail Jones's creative writing lectures at the University of Western Australia. I was a miserable law student – in temperament and ability – and Jones was a debut novelist, or about to be. I wanted a vastly different life to the one that was expected of me, and sitting in her class was the closest I came, for a long time, to daring to admit it. Jones ended her lecture with a reading, and it felt like alchemy – to watch someone turn ideas into art. Like many clever kids, I only knew how to do the opposite. I left her classroom that day with something new, terrifying and entirely mine: permission to make something. I'm pulled back into that memory every time Jones writes a novel. There will be an image – a flourish, a cadence – that transports me back into that stolen seat, listening to her voice. In Jones's latest book, The Name of the Sister, that moment arrived on page 51 with the description of a decades-long friendship: 'Sometimes Bev and Angie, at the end of a long talk, had a drink and toasted 'constitutional seriousness', both pleased to have a friend with whom to discuss what is seldom expressed, those dark, churning thoughts that turned in the night like sticky clay, like the cling of the earth itself, like the sightless underground world, loss, poor decisions, miscarriages, grief. The way nothing fitted together. The way beauty might be convulsive. The way sadness might be pious. The command of godforsaken things to be noticed and to matter.' What a sentence: the command of godforsaken things to be noticed and to matter. If there is a unifying project to Jones's fiction – an animating force – this might be it. The Name of the Sister is Jones's 11th novel and her first whodunit. With it, she joins a growing list of Ozlit stars – Kate Mildenhall, James Bradley and Mandy Beaumont among them – who are having a crack at crime. There are plenty of ways to interpret this literary shift, from the cynical to the political to the playful. What interests me most is what these writers are doing with the conventions of the genre – or despite them. Jones's contribution is perplexing. On a lonely stretch of highway, on the outskirts of Broken Hill, a woman stumbles into the headlights of an oncoming car. She is skin and bones, the victim of prolonged captivity. Her voice box has been crushed by human hands. The woman cannot speak, or perhaps the very memory of language has been obliterated. 'No one knew who she was. No one knew where she had come from. She had simply arrived,' Jones writes. 'Her life was a puzzle waiting to be solved.' Bev and Angie – our serious friends – are caught up in that puzzle. A detective on the case, it's Bev's job to trace the unknown woman's identity. Hundreds of people believe they know her, and they have called-in from all over the country, bereft and insistent: 'She was a daughter, a lover, a runaway wife; she was the sister abducted from a playground at the age of nine; she was the teenage cousin who ran off with a stockman, on a whim or a spree, and was never seen again.' A freelance journalist, Angie is captivated by these callers and their ferocious, piteous certainty. There is a story here, she thinks, if only she can work out how to tell it. And so, as Bev narrows in on the truth, Angie listens to the families left behind. It's a wonderful premise – quiet and humane. The weight of absence. The slow agony of waiting. But The Name of the Sister is a fractious, Jekyll-and-Hyde kind of creature – a novel at war with itself. Flip through my copy and you can see that struggle play out: the first half is crowded with margin notes; moments of grace, insight, possibility. The second half is empty. My notes end when a quest begins: Angie and Bev head to Broken Hill to locate the torture site and its savage architect. We know what is coming and that is exactly what we get: an outback hellscape; a couple of hardscrabble locals with hearts of gold; a sadistic bible-mangler ('the cliche of the fictional religious madman unhinged'). The whole dusty trope-a-thon ends with a shootout in an abandoned mine shaft that reads like an outtake from Tim Winton's Juice. Here is yet another tale of lost girls in the big bad bush. A fable – and a terror – as old as the colony. It's a dispiriting narrative turn, and a mighty strange one given everything that has come before. Angie the journo is deeply ambivalent about true-crime reportage and its grisly allure – 'appalled by the public appetite for stories of hurt'. She's particularly wary of the way 'outback barbarism' is used to spice up tales of women's suffering – all that myth and menace. Yet that's the precisely the story she wanders into, like some ensorcelled mortal drawn down into the underworld ('the maw of possibilities, deep down and red'). Jones even gives us a cattle-mutt Cerberus. The Name of the Sister seems mildly disgusted with itself – apologetically indulgent (or should that be indulgently apologetic?). And that's the real mystery here. Not the lost girl, but the lost novel – the one that's been overridden, derailed and repudiated. The novel that might have made space for silence, for ambiguity, for the ache of not knowing; for the light left burning, and the empty chair at the dinner table. The novel that honoured, without spectacle, the quiet command at the heart of Jones's best work: that even godforsaken things must be noticed and made to matter. 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