In Melbourne he unloads a truck of bananas then heads north for an interesting sojourn in a warm-hearted fishing village. Further north, in Sydney, he watches a detective find the car he stole to get there. A sign in a window says ‘Help wanted inquire within’. So now Fox has a job making hamburgers across the road from a racetrack and a bunch of real good mates. His boss, Han, introduces him to the track and to a writer called Frank; Fox finds the girl on his own. She trains her father’s horses, works in advertising, and wants to make her own films. She immediately responds to his sincere silent ways. He asks her out to tea when they meet; she cooks for him. Eileen is beautiful and smart, and buys him a pack for a journey she knows he must take alone. Everyone guesses there was something in Fox’s past, something he’s running away from, but no one guesses what it is. The detective catches up with him and Fox is on the run again. There is complication with the detective’s excessive regard for the beautiful girl and his pursuit of Fox beyond the call of duty. Fox goes further and further north, and Eileen, with Frank as scriptwriter, makes a film (an arthouse kind of thing, it sounds like) which is inspired, of course, by Jim Fox. (It occurred to me that this book might make a good film, too, if books do. A romantic on-the-road ad venture. Laurence Clifford could star).

Anyway, that, partly, is the story. Fox is a slim novel, to its credit. I’m always impressed by narrative drive, and Fox has that. The book’s contemporaneity lies not only in the language and the passing references to Alan Bond or pop songs, but in the obsession with identity.

Identity is the theme of the times; we’re all going on about what it means to be Australian in a way, as it’s often pointed out, that French people never discuss Frenchness or Americans Americanness. The identity of Jim Fox is an issue with everyone and, inevitably, with himself. All the hints are brought to a head when, on the run up north, Fox enters a bush pub. He’d pass for white, (up to now, no one’s mentioned his ethnic ambiguity; the hints are the author’s) but here he stays on the blacks’ side of the barrier. A barroom brawl soon follows, and an Aboriginal death in custody soon after that. Later, Fox joins a tribe of blacks, working on their own property in Arnhem land, and there he picks up a few more clues on how to find out who he is.

What questions do you raise about an author who writes a finding-yourself novel about an Australian who gradually reveals his Aboriginality? Only one, maybe: how well does he do it? (Very well). Why does there seem to be an element of romantic fantasy here? Was that intended and does it matter? I don’t mind romantic fantasy (even in the guise of gritty realism) nor do I doubt that an identification with the Aboriginal is what this country needs for its soul.

Fox is an intensely romantic figure. The enigma of his identity is meant to fascinate. He’s the stranger on the run who is immediately liked and trusted by all the good people. It’s a bit like those princess fantasies that girls write, where the subject/object of the story is an adorable, special, artistic being and the good people are those who see her that way. Fox is a bit of a male fairy-tale, with its learning-who-he-is protagonist, a taciturn, sensitive, driven man who’s gotta do what he’s gotta do, and by their responses to him all others are judged. (If one of these men comes your way, give him all you have and let him go when he must).

When Fox hears some piano music by Satie (Satie!) ‘[the] slowpaced notes fell like drops of rain from the leaves of a quiet forest and his heart chimed with every one of them. It was an exquisite sensation … he knew that another had taken the sweet moisture off life’s wet lips and tuned it to sound’. This is in fact a good description of something difficult to describe, an untutored person genuinely responding to music, and Fox’s response is not unnoticed. A woman says ‘we are moved by that music but Fox, you were changed … We know the names but you know the music’. Fox is a magnet for trouble, but that only makes him more appealing. Fox brings out the decent bloke, the helper, the nurturer, and the rescuer in everyone. (Except the racist rednecks).

This suggests sentimentality, but as I was reading this I noted the ‘unsentimental’ language. Sentimentality seems undercut by the fair dinkum Aussie speech – wry, wise, laconic; lots of deflating one-liners. There’s even an acknowledgement of the trendy tendencies to romanticize the blacks:

There are three kinds of Aboriginal Sociologists … The delighted are romantics who say butter wouldn’t melt in a black mouth . . . The benighted sorrow over a disappearing primitive culture, and the third and newest group are those who see the blacks as blighted – just like whiteys but black.

The book’s greatest enjoyments are in its details, and the voices of the cast of characters met along the road, the exact observation, and the assured depiction of outback life. The story’s taut episodes cut one to another with fast-moving skill.