Word: novelization
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...thrilling to watch the leaps a literary imagination can make. Long-listed for the Man Booker Prize, Gail Jones' 2004 novel Sixty Lights was partly inspired by the life of pioneering 19th century photographer Julia Margaret Cameron, etching the story of Lucy Strange in 60 short-chapter "exposures" with the vividness of an exploding flashbulb...
...photograph should appear... as if God had breathed it onto the glass," Lucy writes. Jones' breathless wonderment at the machines of modernity was next parlayed into her third novel Dreams of Speaking (2006), where academic heroine Alice is literally lost in Wonderland as she ponders "those things wired, lit, automatic and swift"-from space travel and cinema to Hedy Lamarr's invention of a radio-controlled torpedo and the horror of Hiroshima...
...Slipping between first and third person ("This is a story that can only be told in a whisper," Jones' narrator begins), this finely calibrated novel gives voice to a girl's tentative coming of age. But just as powerfully, it addresses the dilemma of inhabiting, spiritually as well as spatially, the vast continent of Australia. The daughter of Shakespeare-obsessed Stella, and named after Hermione's abandoned daughter from The Winter's Tale, Perdita can't reconcile the vast Outback landscape of her childhood with the transported English culture of her schooling-"all this life, all this huge unelaborated life...
...Perdita's father and is banished to reform school in Perth, Sorry begins to articulate the deep unease of a family faced with the unfinished business of history. And it is around the grisly events that took place in the kitchen of the Keenes' cattle- station shack that the novel cinematically circles...
...note accompanying Sorry, Jones refers to the 1997 Human Rights Commission report that recorded the removal of thousands of indigenous children from their families, and to Australian Prime Minister John Howard's refusal to apologize for the actions of previous governments. In a novel of such resonance and restraint, this epilogue strikes the sole forced note. For Australian readers, at least, the title carries enough emotional weight to speak volumes, and Jones is too subtle and cerebral a writer to suggest a polemical reading of her text. Instead, Sorry is most eloquent expressing a more singular kind of sorrow, while...