We meet Bea fearfully writing­out for her psychiatrist some of her squashed down childhood: ‘Late at night, wrapped in blankets, we are bundled into the car. A slipper with a mouse for a face is missing. My mother is weeping, she is wiping away blood with the tears ...’ But Bea’s story is not to be delivered sequentially. In this book, all the characters who connect with Bea in present time are labouring to bring forth the stories of their childhoods, fighting off or welcoming in family ghosts and testing the efficacy of words in laying them to rest. All except one, what’s more, are engaged in writing their stories as opposed to just remembering or discussing.

Terrified by loss, and discovering in the doctor’s ‘magic room’ that childhood is not over with but frighteningly present, Bea writes about that because she can’t write her book. The novel is almost as much about the business of writing as about the stories of the individual characters, especially about the underlay of autobiography in all fiction and the abiding necessity for fiction writers to be in touch with their own stories/selves: ‘this awful, unmanageable being; the secret self her writing [for the doctor] suggested she had always been, who had emerged, like Alice in Wonderland, a grotesque giantess, fitting nowhere and bumping her head on the ceiling.’

Burke has Bea reflect that not being able to write her new fiction is akin to having the special ‘one who was there for me’ go away, laughingly referring to an imaginary companion or guardian angel. While waiting for this good-fairy muse to return, she writes her own repressed life, over­shadowed by the figure of a domineering father.

Daringly, Burke sets this Western-style attempt at reconciliation with the self against a similar project undertaken in a very different way by Bea’s friend in their St Helen’s community. Queenie, half-Koori and half-Scot (a character who slides a little close to a Grandma Moses persona at times), is realised on the whole not merely competently but with brio. Thoughtfully conceived as an embodiment of contending styles of self-realisation, immersed both in the stern fancies of the Bible and in unquestioning belief in an ancestor spirit-world, she invokes her ghost matter-of-factly and refers quite unselfconsciously to a Writing Spirit (sent by God). A fascinating intersection of both women’s quests occurs as Queenie, too, hits a barren patch, which she attributes to her father holding out on her:

‘Pa,’ Queenie murmured, ‘You there? That what this is all about, this dozey day, no work done, no writing either ... You hiding from me, Pa. You going to sing me a song?’

Queenie keeps open house for strays and relatives, and she keeps them up to date with formal readings of her continuing saga. Other household members, such as transient Raoul, hold truck with other means of connecting with what’s gone or coming, and niece Lisa has a crucial ‘sighting’ in Raoul’s borrowed crystal ball – a woman being tied to a tree in the home orchard. This precipitates Queenie’s crisis, which is shown to be not dissimilar to Bea’s in having to do with the repressed image of the Father lawgiver and punisher.

The fact that Burke brings off this dual revelation of germinal truth-of­self, arrived at along such divergent paths by Bea and Queenie, seems to me an important imaginative achievement in terms of Australian writing to date. In a pivotal fable, written by Bea around the middle of the narrative, Burke provides an ur-story of girls abandoned, who find means to survive until accosted by a man wayfarer to whom they offered shelter. This man they kill and hide, resolving to kill all visitors thenceforward. On a visit to town to barter, they are surprised by ‘them’, who reclaim the girls and imprison them in a fine new home with barred windows and doors.

‘Adults can’t be trusted. That’s the moral of the story,’ says the doctor. In a way, it’s the moral of this book, though Bea herself is a trustworthy mother. All the characters have been denied safe homes in childhood and lack trust as adults. All, in various ways, find means to accommodate this painful truth, once realised.

Burke’s writing is assured, often lyrical. Its self-reflexivity adds a dimension which qualifies the book to belong to the literature of écriture. In its cross-culturality, it doesn’t over-reach itself, and abounds with saving ironies. Queenie, who begins her writing with a list of names, ‘just like the Book of Chronicles’, writes in a no-frills fashion, like the Bible, because ‘pretty’ seems either disrespectful or covering-up for insubstantiality ‘like those novels Bea swallowed about some fiddly problem such as some fella got off with another fella’s missus and that was it. Big deal.’ The Irish Rover, Jack, Bea’s wandering lover, who sends her missives about his County Mayo youth, is somewhat less convincing, his Hibernianisms laid on a little thickly, and one notices that all the culturally-demarcated writers lapse into the same sort of broken-line quasi-poetry at regular intervals, but these are minor matters.

In writing a book that both functions as an index of possibilities of all sorts of reconciliations and acts as a demonstration and critique of available methods, while all the time remaining a moving and telling multi-faceted nar­rative in its own right, Janine Burke has established herself as a significant force in current fiction.