The characters – navel-gazing, small-minded, and with limited horizons – need not have been made dull. Their quests to understand the nature of spirituality and to come to terms with unsatisfactory lives could have been the stuff of a stimulating novel. Life, death, love, religion, spirituality – these are the central concerns of Garner’s characters as much as they are the central concerns, in varying measure, of the lives of each and every one of her readers. Unfortunately, one is rarely drawn into the characters’ lives, and any potential sympathy for them is short-lived.

That staid or uninspiring characters can be the subject of great fiction is not the question here. One has only to look at works such as Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day or An Artist of the Floating World to see unsympathetic, dull, pretentious, pompous, anachronisms providing the skeleton for scintillating and stimulating writing. In Garner’s hands, the motley inhabitants of Sweetpea Mansions remain dull, pretentious, pompous anachronisms.

Cosmo Cosmolino begins with the short story ‘Recording Angel’, in which the narrator witnesses the death of the friend who has served as the keeper of her memories. The story ends with the appearance of one of the book’s angels, a ‘small, serious, stone-eyed angel of mercy’. Death and the concomitant responsibility for death are the themes of the second story, ‘A Vigil’. Characters and memories of events from these stories converge in the novella that gives the book its title. Here, in a large inner-city terrace, Janet lives as she has lived since the communal household days of the 1970s, with the lives of other people swirling gently around her in her own home. Sometimes the angles of these lives draw fractionally closer, sometimes they collide.

Janet is torn between her desire to recreate a sense of the community of ideas and ideals of an earlier period of her life and the feeling that she is past all that and in need of something more private and stable. Family, marriage, children, career, things not sorted out in the 1970s: these are now the source of some resentment and a starched resignation.

Maxine is a starry-eyed New Age freak who constructs useless artefacts from twigs and sticks in her shed in the garden of Sweetpea Mansions. It takes little to convince Maxine of anything. She dreams of participating in a Golden Aeroplane scheme, a pyramid rip-off in which she believes that her unbounded faith will be enough to ensure that she will ‘fly out’ with her $1,000 multiplied to $8,000.

Ray, who was Raymond in ‘A Vigil’, has faith of a different kind. He trades biblical maxims with Janet, and awaits salvation in the form of his brother, Alby, who will lift him, angel-like, out of his misery.

Together these three should have provided Garner with enough substance to make something compelling. Instead, their grapplings with spirituality and the meaning of faith are unconvincing, their dilemmas treated simplistically, and the whole gathered about in a rush of meaningless hyperprose.

Nicholas Hasluck, speaking at the Melbourne Writers’ Festival (a speech subsequently printed in Quadrant of December 1991), says of Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day that, despite its stately pace and bland opening chapters, ‘as the book progresses the predicament and the emotions of those involved awaken our sympathy and interest ... the secrets buried in the text make one eager to read on’. If one agrees with Hasluck, and the Booker Prize judges, there must be something in the writing, the style itself, that is so intimately wedded to the substance as to make the one indistinguishable from the other. It is here that Garner has tripped and fallen.

She may well be a stylist, a stylish writer. But whatever style it is that she is said to possess has been used in this work to muffle the intent. Turn to any page and sentences, quoted by admiring critics as examples of fine style, leap out to challenge anyone who admires economy with words or craves clarity of expression. For example: ‘With a churning roll and a trample she picked up speed and rocketed, whistling-eared, dead vertical from the city’s paltry pencil-clump towards the meniscus of the day.’ What? Now there is a sentence that has been worked and reworked and reworked again. Not that there is anything wrong with painstaking revision, but should it be so obvious to the reader?

The characters in ‘Recording Angel’ listen to what they think is a string quartet. It turns out to be a quintet, ‘the one with two cellos’. The narrator:

Now I could hear the extra cello, the point of it, what it was there for.

It dropped through a rent in the net and plunged away into the darkness, crying out. It groaned a warning: it prowled, it ranged, it lay in wait. It was the bad dream of the quartet, brooding, ravening outside the fold, and its argument was doubt and panic, a desolation as yet unlived.

Really!

Like the dreadful Maxine, one is left wishing on every page that Garner would talk less and say more.