Buy, borrow or steal this elegantly presented short book. Once started, you will read it from cover to cover with complete enjoyment.
True, this is a ghost story, but it is also so much more. The tale is told by Frances who explores aspects of Sydney life from the point of view of a recent arrival from Melbourne. You meet not only an interesting dog but many interesting people. Family and friends and acquaintances come vividly to life. You make the acquaintance of a famous if boring writer, a fascinating Russian expatriate, a well-muscled creative organiser, a casual lover and a horrible child. They are so real you would recognise them instantly if you met them again. You might like some of them and dislike others but nothing in between.
With Frances, you walk her nervous dog through a semi-neglected western Sydney suburb and admire the exotic flowering of wonderful plants while avoiding accidental confrontations with other dogs. It is on these walks that perhaps a ghost is encountered. Torkil Gudnason’s beautiful minimalist photographs of some of these blooms meet you at the end of chapters.
The book is filled with wry or sharp quotable sentences from a writer with a superb mastery of the English language. When Frances, a vegetarian, is limited to green leaves at a friend’s dinner party she remarks that her host ‘believed that if you didn’t eat meat you weren’t hungry’. Or take this acid example: ‘Tim’s chin was of the opinion that The Da Vinci Code really made you think of religion.’
Is a review more credible if some flaw is highlighted, something less than adequate brought to the potential reader’s attention? Perhaps so. In this case the worst thing that can be said about this book is that it is short but not too short.This book is as good as a ghost story gets.
