Central to the novel are the questions of what we want from relationships, what we take and what we withhold. The narrator recounts how intimacy was worn away by her long suffering of what, for convenience, they come to call an ‘illness’, but which is perhaps of the spirit rather than the body. This malady brings forth various permutations of ‘servitude and its abuses’. The narrator passively enslaves those who love her: her mother, a devoted neighbour and, primarily, her partner. Her weakness demands the full use of his natural ‘goodness’ and finally exhausts it, but the abuses of servitude run in both directions: kindness offers him a way of concealing his own desires and, in putting her first, he has been able to hide himself.

Their chance meeting is another failure, one that again begs for clarity but that cannot be explained: ‘We were one another’s underworld and we could have led one another out. Yet we failed, and I cannot understand exactly how ... Was it I, Orpheus like, who looked back to you and caused your descent into the city street, to be lost forever. Or was it you who did not turn back, who never did turn back (but was that for the love of something?), and I Eurydice, who refused to follow?’

The Singing examines the underbelly of what happens in love. We do not simply look for happiness but may reach out for pain and humiliation, using ourselves as testing grounds for feeling. The novel mocks the common platitude of emotional healthiness: ‘as if two people together could ever be hygienic and I thought of us, clean, like fridges.’ Admonitions of healing and healthiness presume that time has the power to remake us, but The Singing focuses on the impossibility of the past ever truly being so – ‘there are spaces preserved by every person I have ever taken and been taken into. They open up again. And close.’ Loss is not tamed, feelings may grow less acute but they do not depart, grief returns to hit us in the chest when we least expect it. The constant presence of what has gone before recalls Rilke’s questioning, ‘Who has twisted us around like this, so that / no matter what we do, we are in the posture / of someone going away?’; and there is much in the novel’s delineation of longing and the impossibility of its proper fulfilment that is reminiscent of that poet’s work.

The Singing possesses an extraordinary mastery of tone, all the more impressive given that this is Bishop’s first book. The narrator’s illness brings its own way of looking, deliberate and reflective, and the detailed descriptions keep this novel of emotion rooted in the actual: the peeling of an orange; her lover’s back hunched to pull on a buttoned shirt; two city pigeons vying for space.

This poetry of careful observation also allows wonderfully deft characterisation: we know the man through his refusal to carry an umbrella ‘just in case’, and his irritation at saucers, preferring to put his cup down wherever he likes. The novel is terribly sad in parts – including a final dinner that is almost gruesome – but never maudlin. The ‘I’ that has lived through this loss is in mourning but is not indulgent, and although readers know how this story will end, they are kept on board through the intensity of its telling.

In The Patron Saint of Eels, we move from a circumscribed interior world to a concern with relationships within communities and with nature. The book is billed as a ‘contemporary fable’, and its namesake is an eighteenth-century saint, Fra Ionio, who earned his stripes by supposedly bringing a catch of eels back to life in the Italian village of Stellanuova. Ionio followed his countrymen on their migration to Victoria and now comes down to earth to intervene on behalf of eels and offer inspiration to the locals, in this case the novel’s narrator, Noel Lea, and his friend Nanette Burns.

Gregory Day depicts a country world of pub yarns, simple happiness and a deep, if unarticulated, connection to the land. Its heroes are old bush characters still in possession of ‘that vast and intimate family knowledge born out of the gifts of improvisation and bushcraft, of getting by’. The rendering of everyday rural speech is not easy, and Day handles its blunt cadences well. However, a perception of the world that is dominated by telling silences necessarily falters when called on to articulate the miraculous, and Noel falls into exclamations of ‘weird’ and repeated references to Fra Ionio’s tinkling silver bell. But then it is not clear what language would be appropriate to his ‘miraculous’ story.

Fra Ionio’s ‘unimaginable’ and ‘life-changing’ message is, basically, that humans should have faith that things will turn out all right, there being a divinity that shapes and so on; that the natural world is a constant wonder; and that people need people. Unfortunately, this indisputable, if unremarkable, message is underpinned by a ridiculous cosmology of the afterlife as a ‘mirror earth’, bound by ‘unpredictable laws’ but involving the bathetic notion that heaven is where ‘your wishes are manufactured … Your pleasures are made constant’. Except the desire for chocolate, that is, the absence of which apparently keeps heaven interesting. Maybe it’s the country air or Fra Ionio’s constant dinging, but Noel and Nan are easily entranced by this tripe, finding in it a return to the ‘magic’ they had thought was lost in the modern world of tourists and local government regulations.

In contrast to this transparent ‘contemporary fable’, classic fairy tales are strange, dark creatures where right and wrong are hard to predict. Events are not explained, let alone psychologised, but are left to cast long shadows that shelter many meanings. Here it is all explained, but banally. Day’s story works best when it escapes its pat moral lessons; that is, ironically, before the ‘magic’ returned.

The Patron Saint of Eels is a lovely book to look at, and the story is sweet. It is certainly a happier novel than The Singing. Perhaps it is a good thing that readers can choose between stories that offer them a breather and those that take their breath away.