Reviewed by Rama Gaind.
By Gregory Day, Transit Lounge, $32.99.
The Bell of the World offers insights into the characteristics and key events of human life, ensuring our interplay with nature and with one another – to talk and listen – are enacted.
There’s a mesmerising quality to Gregory Day’s writing that captures the imagination. It’s partly due to the poetic beauty of the language. It also has something to do with the central character, Sarah Hutchinson. She is appealing, talented and annoying.
Returning to Australia from boarding school in England and time spent in Europe, an unsettled Hutchinson is sent to live with her eccentric Uncle Ferny on the family property, Ngangahook. The sound of the ocean surrounds everything they do on the farm.
Sarah and her uncle form an inspired bond hosting visiting field naturalists and holding soirees in which Sarah performs on a piano, the sound of which she has altered with items and objects from the bush and shore.
As Sarah’s world is nourished by music and poetry, Ferny’s life is marked by Such is Life, a book he has read and reread, so much so that the volume is falling apart. Its saviour is Jones the Bookbinder of Moolap, who performs a miraculous act. To shock and surprise, Jones interleaves Ferny’s volume with a book he bought from an American sailor, a once obscure tale of whales and the sea.
In art as in life, nature seems supreme. Ngangahook and its environs are threatened. However, when community members ask the Hutchinsons to help ‘make a savage landscape sacred’ by financing the installation of a town bell, the fearless musician and her idealistic uncle refuse to buckle to local pressures, mounting their own defence of ‘the bell of the world’.
