Catherine Ford

An unnamed visitor and note taker wanders present day Paris in Antoni Jach’s new novel, researching something about the city’s ‘many layers’. This amorphous and arduous quest brings him to a certain library where, while he is waiting for a book on aboveground Paris to be retrieved, a spirited American woman tries to draw him out on his work and why he’s in Paris. He airily responds that his interest lies not only in the city’s underground layers but ‘the buildings and the ether’. He’s remote and strangely earnest yet she’s keen to meet him again, whereas he ‘feels like a barbarian’ in her company and is too neurotically preoccupied with some other kind of engage­ment, an exchange with history, to flirt.

Fiona Capp’s accomplished first novel is pungent with sea-salt and urgent with the relentless momentum of the waves. It opens with the image of tsunami, a freak wave that grows from a shudder in the seabed to a wall of ocean which engulfs the landscape of the novel, an image which is recalled most effectively through the book to echo in metaphor the emotional upheavals of its characters.

These characters are strongly but sparely drawn: we meet them over a summer holiday season and learn little more of them than is necessary to give each motivation and convincing life. Hannah is a year into Melbourne University; commended all her life for having her feet firmly on the ground, she ‘dreams of walking on water’ and has come down the Mornington Peninsula with a secondhand surfboard to try to make the dream into one kind of reality. Marcus and his son Jake fled to the Peninsula from the Liverpool docks, putting distance between themselves and the pain of Jake’s mother’s death from cancer. Jake surfs under the jealous mentorship of a polio-stunted science teacher and Marcus collects the detritus and the distinctive treasures that the sea spews up along the tideline.