Review by Gillian, Berkelouw Mona Vale

Gail Jones is bewitched by the beauty of Sydney Harbour and its glorious perimeter. During her recent talk at our store, Jones speculated that only an outsider could write a book so centred on the harbour articulating its dazzle unabashed and without qualification.

Jones' "Five Bells" tells the story of four characters who converge on Circular Quay on the same day. All of them come from somewhere else. Two of them know each other and the quay will be the site of a tentative reconnection. The other two come from other countries and bring with them memories of joy and loss. All four will cross paths fleetingly.

In his poem "Five Bells" (one of the inspirations for this book) Ken Slessor explores the idea that his friend Joe, although drowned, still exists somewhere distilled into the very water of the harbour. Jones' characters brim with their history and her writing about memory conveys the sense that events and people from the past merge and persist as time passes. To purloin one of Jones' own images - memories are "deposited like radium in the substrate of ... cells".

In Jones' work, as in Slessor's poem, water in many forms becomes a medium for carrying and preserving memory - whether it be as snow, or a water-driven clock or water in lungs - it is everywhere, suggesting both the movement of time and its floating suspension. The novel itself flows forward as the day progresses, but is also reticulated as each of the character's stories are revisited as ellipses.

This is a beautifully written novel with precisely deployed language using metaphysical devices to make the most intangible human experiences live on the page. The ending is true to the ideas it explores with four parallel realities coexisting - untidily and ambiguously. Some readers might feel dissatisfied by this but I definitely did not.