The Houdinis have escaped. Acantia and Pa have taken their seven children away from the city – away from the ‘great world’ of ‘music and concerts and people eating undersized sausages with thumb and forefinger’– and have sought refuge in a house called Whispers. The house, Sallis tells us, is ‘a strange conglomeration, partly an old hall, the former residence of a bankrupt named Angus Bad, secreted on a large bushland property in the hills near the city of Toggenberg’. This is a place to hide from the strictures of modem life. As Acantia declares to her family with characteristic passion: ‘All the spiritual masters and the great artists retreat from the world.’ To this list she might add ‘fictional Australians searching for meaning’.