I have always been an admirer of Garner’s sense of structure, of the careful juggling of scenes and conversations that gives her fiction many of the qualities of a good film. But in The Children’s Bach she has outdone herself; in using music as the central motif of this novella she has armed herself with the inexhaustible supply of ready-made structures which music provides.

The overall structure of the book approximates that of a fugue (Bach wrote lots), which Otto Karolyi describes like this:

The fugue is based on a medolic ‘theme’ or ‘subject’ of marked character, which is stated alone at the beginning and which reappears at various places and pitches during the course of the composition … There are three or four lines simultaneous melodic lines moving with considerable independence, but forming at the same time satisfactory harmonic progressions … The final rounding-off of a fugue is often done by adding an extra few bars to the main structure, which serve to conclude the whole piece with a flourish.

It would be impertinent as well as pointless to speculate on the extent to which Garner has deliberately modelled her book on this form, but some of the parallels are striking. The ‘subject’ of Garner’s book is the nature of families and family life; this is ‘stated alone at the beginning’ in a description of a photograph on the wall of the Fox kitchen. The picture is of Tennyson with his wife and children; the assertion that whenever this dilapidated picture is about to come unstuck ‘someone saves it, someone sticks it back’ serves practically as a synopsis of the rest of the book, which consists of short contrapuntal scenes in which variations on the theme of family relationships and domestic life are played. In this context the non-marital sexual relationships appear as aberrations, distortions or, at best, reflections of marriage itself.

Reading the end of the book, the flourish of ‘an extra few bars’ is as much like listening to the end of a Bach fugue as writing it must have been like playing one. Having slipped (with stealth as well as craft) back and forth between past and present tenses throughout the book, Garner moves into the future tense for the last page or two, indicating that for her characters – and, by implication, for everybody – things will go on as they are, in a plus ca change sort of way, and we will all be all right. The tentative indications of continuity implied in the opening passage of the book are beautifully balanced by this joyful assertion of it at the end.

If Athena seems to be at the heart of the book it’s mainly because she is clearly the character with whose values and qualities the writer is most in sympathy. But Garner has taken great pains to give her five adult characters a fairly equal share each of page space, and her method of achieving this rather difficult goal is intrinsic to the musical structuring; like each ‘voice’ in a fugue, each character’s consciousness takes its turn to dominate.

So much has already been said over the last few years about Garner’s virtues as a stylist that it’s only necessary to add one thing here: she seems in this book to have used musical models to structure her sentences themselves; in many places the sentence rhythms are unmistakably those of music, and it wouldn’t be stretching a point to say that a prosodic analysis of some of them (especially, again, in the final section), held up to the musical notation of some of Bach’s more typical compositions, would yield some very interesting comparisons.

Music plays an equally important part within the narrative itself. It’s central to Athena’s strength and serenity, central – apparently – to Elizabeth’s success and prosperity, central to Philip’s whole existence. Dexter sings, Poppy plays the piano and the cello, Billy in his fits of hysteria is calmable by music, and it’s music that gives the characters their best moments alone together.

It’s extremely difficult to write about music because the effect depends so heavily on the reader’s own knowledge of it. But Garner’s musical tastes, at least for the purposes of this book, are eclectic; and anybody who knows an A from a B flat, or a soprano from a contralto, or Jimmy Barnes from James Reyne, is likely to be startled and charmed by the ways Garner finds of conveying verbally the effects of music: ‘... but he struck one quiet chord, a wide blue one ...’; ‘On the jukebox they had Elvis Presley. They had Elisabeth Schwarzkopf. They had Les Paul and Mary Ford singing “How High the Moon”.’

Under its realist surface the text makes enough poststructuralist gestures to give itself a foot in each camp; it’s self-referential, as art, both in its Judie relationship with the nature of music and in much of its actual dialogue. Philip, instructing a walk-on groupie in the art of songwriting, is in fact describing the narrative method of the book in which he is a character:

‘Go home and write it again. Take out the cliches ... Just leave in the images. Know what I mean? You have to steer a line between what you understand and what you don’t. Between cliché and the other thing. Make gaps. Don’t chew on it. Don’t explain everything. Leave holes.’

In the unlikely event that any feminist reader is still silly enough to read Garner’s celebration of domestic life as some kind of political betrayal, she or he will scarcely know what to make of a distressing scene near the end of the book, the only scene in which tough Elizabeth is brought completely undone:

... she picked up off the counter one of those little four-page bulletins on duplicator paper which announce the results of inter-pub darts and pool competitions.

There was a joke at the bottom of the page. She read it.

Gynaecologist to dentist:

‘I don’t know how you can stand your job, smelling people’s bad breath all day.’

Her legs surprised her: that old, almost forgotten sensation, as if all the blood were draining rapidly out of them, leaving them fragile and chalky, unable to support her.

They do hate us, she thought. The weight of disgust that loaded the simple joke made her bones weak.

One of the most appealing things about this book is the intelligent and clearsighted way that Garner represents domestic life at its best as emotionally and aesthetically irresistible, while managing at the same time to maintain a solid, only gently sardonic post-feminist perspective on its day-to-day encounters:

‘It’s an iron,’ said Athena.

She pulled the cardboard and the packing off it and took hold of the pale plastic handle. The cord was brown, flecked with blue, and was tightly wound in a rubber band.

‘We’ve already got an iron, haven’t we dear,’ said Dexter.

‘This is a good iron, though,’ said Athena. ‘Ours is old.’

‘I knew you had a lot of clothes to iron,’ said Mrs. Fox. ‘I saw this in Myers and J thought I’ll get that for Athena, I know what it’s like when the shirts pile up, not to mention tablecloths and so on, so I bought it. There’s a guarantee card in the box, you should fill it out and send it back to them straight away, just in case there’s something wrong with it.’

‘Athena doesn’t do all that much ironing,’ said Dexter.

Athena held the iron at arm’s length, raised it and lowered it as if to test its weight. ‘It’s a very good iron,’ she said.

‘I love to see the creases in their little pyjama pants,’ said Mrs. Fox.

Dexter took the iron. ‘It’s so light,’ he said. ‘How could you make things flat with that? Irons should be heavy.’

The women looked at each other.

Here as elsewhere the women arrive at complete mutual understanding without a word being spoken; communication is achieved through the subtle semaphore of domestic objects, as in the already much-quoted passage in which Elizabeth and Athena, folding sheets, arrive at an understanding about Philip, whom Elizabeth hands over along with her end of the folded sheet. What makes this scene so effective is that it is initially presented from the perspective of Philip’s daughter Poppy, who can see the women but is too far away to hear what they’re saying, too young to read what they’re doing. In the early scene where these two women meet for the first time, we learn much about both of them not from what they say, but from Elizabeth’s reaction to a tiny domestic signal:

‘She’s a frump,’ thought Elizabeth with relief; but Athena stepped forward and held out her hand, and Elizabeth saw the cleverly mended sleeve of her jumper and was suddenly not so sure.

The book’s most memorable scenes are those in which various pairs of characters arrive at a moment of mutual affection or sympathy or enlightenment, and it’s interesting to note that most of these occasions involve an adult and a child: Poppy with her music teacher (‘Go back to B. B, ya sausage! Not B flat!’), Vicki with the little boy at the pool, Elizabeth with Arthur, Poppy with the man in the piano department of Allans. Garner is one of the very few writers whose scenes involving children never have either an ironic moment or an icky one; she writes about children without sentiment or self-indulgence, with confidence, sympathy and humour:

‘You both started it,’ said Arthur. ‘I don’t care if people fight. I think it’s rather interesting, actually.’

‘Mister Cool,’ said Elizabeth. ‘Tiny Tim in the kitchen corner.’

Arthur shot her a flirtatious smile.

‘I must say Arthur,’ said Elizabeth, ‘you have very spunky legs for a boy your age.’

‘I’ve got a girlfriend at school,’ said Arthur.

‘I’m not surprised.’

‘Want to see some photos of me when I was a baby!’ said the boy. ‘I’ll go and get them.’ He darted out of the room.

‘You always con people,’ said Vicki.

‘I have no shame,’ said Elizabeth ... Arthur romped in with a packet. He spread the colour photos out on the scratched table top. Elizabeth bent over them. ‘They’re rude!’ she cried. Arthur skipped about, squint-eyed with laughter. The photos were of a naked baby boy lying on his back like a frog, flashing the enormous, raw genitals of the new-born.

‘That’s what I get for coming on to yobbos,’ said Elizabeth. ‘Put them away, you hoon.’

‘I bet you’re not really shocked,’ said Arthur. ‘I bet you’re only pretending.’ He sniggered to himself and gathered up the photos.’

‘Come on, Vicki,’ said Elizabeth. ‘Let’s get smashed.’

As in Garner’s earlier work, the extraordinary appeal of this book – I haven’t read a single negative review of it or talked to a single person who, having read it, has not been both impressed and charmed – seems to lie mainly in her unerring ability to write scenes, actions, references and bits of dialogue that produce in the reader shock after shock of recognition. As Randall Jarrell has said of Christina Stead, she had the capacity to produce in the reader again and again the response ‘My God, I didn’t know anybody knew that!’