In 2006, forty years after the publication of his first novel, Rappaport, which featured the comic misadventures of a Melbourne Jewish antique dealer, Morris Lurie was awarded the Patrick White Award. He is one of those remarkably durable Australian writers who have extended their careers into a fifth decade. Principally known as a short story writer, published widely in Australia, but also in the New Yorker, Punch and, appropriately, the Transatlantic Review, Lurie’s latest work is his first book of fiction since Seventeen Versions of Jewishness: Twenty Examples in 2001. From Hybrid Publications, To Light Attained is, in its formal essence and central moral issue, a novella, and a fine one.

The novella often deals with intense relationships of intimate dependency between two people, which is often only dissolved through the death of one of them. And that is the case in To Light Attained. We are given notice of what is to come in the novel’s epigraph (drawn from early in the book): ‘How do you write about a child who died? … A child who said enough. A child who finished. A child who said, in our most unsayable way, this child, no more.’ The father is a successful author in his late fifties, Herschel Himmelman, ‘for adults and children the writer’, long separated from his wife, but trying by every desperate and unavailing stratagem to stay close to his daughter and to protect her from the harm that he is sure will befall her.