Comment (1)

• Maggie Nolan’s reading of Gail Jones’s The Name of the Sister deftly details plot and generously acknowledges the author’s craft in creating stories that reveal ‘the ways in which meaning is made’. It also expresses reservations about the breadth and complexity of reference and ambivalent outcomes. This is a psychological novel that draws on crime, detective and outback-noir conventions but there are subversions of genre here as crime and climax are secondary to a prime focus on pre-figuring conditions and aftermath. In Black Mirror I recall Jones’ observation that ‘over and under-exposure are both forms of invisibility’. This narrator, Angie, has an acute understanding of this but also of the risk of becoming inured to horror as she becomes a listener, a witness and unlikely ‘pilgrim’ tested by her involvement in the morass of harm that disappearance of loved ones causes. But in chasing a story she becomes a killer.
  
  The novel begins with two news items and two images. The first, a fleeting but invasive close-up of a grief-stricken man whose family is entombed in a war zone and the other, a photograph of a mute and amnesiac woman whom local police wish to identify. This juxtaposition of global and individual trauma haunts the narrator and prompts a decision to interview people whose lives have been touched by disappearance, entrapment and loss. This is a complex field of reference where personal loss and the public thirst for ‘stories of hurt’ are interrogated. In Australia where women are ‘disappeared’ with appalling regularity Jones’ writing seems carefully apt.
  
  The book’s fine cover by W.H. Chong encapsulates the ambiguity of absence. The shape of an ibis bent to enfold a woman’s faceless head also encloses the title which references a surviving sister. Angie’s childhood fascination with Egyptian legends, especially the sacrificial interment of ibis as tributes to Thoth the god of writing and magic, once suggested to a child the possibility of an afterlife. When the tale is told to Tezza, the man whose troubled life only finds meaning in the rescue of the lost woman on the road, and to Merle whose Indigenous re-reading of place authoritatively re-reads the making of the land on which they meet, Angie masks the significance of her tale’ because she ‘knew how to turn the lock’.
  
  This novel is rich, sharp, challenging and beautiful in design and expression. It quietly demonstrates the disastrous consequences of suppressing truths, be it of a father’s suicide or a nation’s genocide.
  Posted by Lyn Jacobs

  09 July 2025