Elisabeth Murray ties the obfuscation of self tightly to the solidity of place. Much of the novella is devoted to descriptions of the mountain, lake, and – through flashbacks – the caves of the mining-turned-tourist town. Excessive personification fills the narrator’s mind, and people are weighted by how much they can know of or belong to the land. This fixation on place crowds out darker memories. The narrator longs to disappear into the landscape, figuratively and literally, to avoid dealing with what has happened to her, or perhaps with what she has done.

Elisabeth Murray
(photograph supplied)

The reader is informed that several of the town’s key landmarksbear the narrator’s name, but she remains unidentified throughout; in denying the reader her name, the narrator also denies the connections that bind her to her home, a place she can neither return to nor fully escape from. The narrator’s disassociation is indicative of the vagueness that permeates the plot. This conceit is stretched too far, even within the confines of a novella, but for much of its length Murray allows the loud Earth to speak for her narrator, and in doing so presents an insightful tale of psychological dissonance.