Gail Jones
SIXTY LIGHTS
Harvill, $29.95pb, 250pp, 1 843 43196 3

LITERARY TRENDS ARE frequently and cyclically trumpeted on the Australian publishing scene: the memoir boom, the decline of fiction, the death of the literary novel. Gail Jones’s work proves that rumours of the latter’s demise are exaggerated. Jones has published three previous books and each has made a splash locally; both collections of stories — House of Breathing (1992) and Fetish Lives (1997) — and her début novel, Black Mirror (2002), garnered prizes. Jones’s second novel, Sixty Lights, is set to enhance her reputation, especially as she is now published by the prestigious UK publisher Harvill Press.

Sixty Lights opens in Australia with the untimely deaths of the parents of Lucy and Thomas Strange in 1860. The orphaned siblings are adopted by an uncle they have never met, who arrives from India and whisks them off to London. Seven years pass before Lucy, who becomes the novel’s focus, travels to India for a marriage opportunity. A shipboard romance leaves her pregnant and, after a year in Bombay, she is sent back to London as damaged goods.

The aptly named Lucy is photosensitive and has an affinity for light in all its shades and forms. From a young age, she views the world photographically — even before she has learned of the photographic process — becoming obsessed with capturing images, recording them in her diary as ‘Special Things Seen’. Later, having acquired the techniques of nascent photography, she devotes the remainder of her short life to perfecting her own particular approach. Her early death, foreshadowed from the start, frames the novel, but Lucy lives as a woman ahead of her time, a visionary who predicts future uses for photography (such as X-rays and ultrasound) and is prescient about the consequences of privileging the visual.

This novel can be admired from many different angles. From a distance, one appreciates the arc of its plot, with its omniscient narrator and quirky Victorian characters and conventions. In addition, Jones has incorporated reels of historical footage from each of the novel’s three locations. For example, in London, Thomas works for a magic-lantern show — a precursor to moving pictures — whose projected images enchant audiences; Uncle Neville visits spiritualist mediums in an attempt to communicate with his deceased sister; and Lucy is engaged for a time at an albumen factory, manufacturing early photographic paper by the application of egg whites.

In close-up, the reader is engaged by the elegant language through which this narrative is expressed. Jones is a consummate prose stylist with a poet’s sense of rhythm and an artist’s eye. She paints word pictures, layering her tableaux with colours and shapes. Moreover, Jones likes to unsettle our expectations of words by deploying them in unusual or old-fashioned ways, and — as is entirely appropriate to an historical novel — she revives arcane language. She has a penchant throughout her fiction for creating new compound nouns: image-birthing, grief-envelope, mother-things.

Jones’s writing is unselfconsciously ‘literary’, but this aspect is not pursued at the expense of story or rounded characters. Granted, there are some dense passages, but most do not interrupt the novel’s flow because they are so artfully composed. Jones’s imagery is freighted with ideas. Some of the themes of Sixty Lights have surfaced in her earlier fiction: the silence of grief and loss; the relationship between ways of seeing and perceiving, and how these shift as technologies change; the inexpressibility of certain bodily experiences; how memories are transmitted, sometimes wordlessly, across generations; the symbolic importance of objects and how their materiality registers absences; the sacrifices required by artistic endeavour.

Particular significance is laid in this work upon the influence of popular novels in the mid-nineteenth century as, with rising literacy rates, more people could interpret their lives through these fictional scripts. Lucy’s mother was devoted to Jane Eyre, while Great Expectations, which Uncle Neville reads to the Strange children in serial form, proves at various times both an inspiration and a consolation: ‘The novel made London seem altogether more actual and they were all delighted that Dickens had mentioned Australia: it validated an existence others took as vague conjecture.’ There is a self-reflexive moment in Jones’s own novel when Lucy contemplates the nature of reading fiction: ‘Reading was this metaphysical meeting space — peculiar, specific, ardent, unusual — in which black words neatly spaced on a rectangular page persuaded her that hypothetical people were as real as she, that not diversion, but knowing, was the gift story gave her. She learnt how other people entered the adventure of being alive.’ There is perhaps no better description of the power of Sixty Lights.

Photography is the central concern of the sixty chapters of this work. At intervals, Lucy’s ‘Special Things Seen’ are pasted like snapshots into the book and are later joined by entries on ‘Photographs Not Taken’: ‘those things she had seen photographically but without her camera, those things that moved her, with or without a frame, and those things she had not seen physically, but been granted vision, by others.’ Ultimately, photography serves as a metaphor for Jones’s novel, which — borrowing from Susan Sontag’s On Photography (1977) — captures experience at a specific time and place, reproduces it, and then itself becomes the experience.

Comparisons can be drawn between Sixty Lights and — given the shared preoccupation with photography — Delia Falconer’s The Service of Clouds (1997), whose male protagonist is similarly enthralled by the magic of photography. Increasingly, though, it is apparent that Jones has developed her own distinctive style. Sixty Lights is set to make waves, and these just might break on international shores.