Reviewed by Rama Gaind.
By Philip Salom, Transit Lounge, $29.99.
Here is an interesting narrative: a writer pre-occupied with missing people and what happens when he moves to a small Australian coastal town called Blue Bay.
It’s the story of Jack who is preoccupied by the phenomenon of found people: the Somerton Man, the Gippsland Man, the Isdal Woman. People who are found dead – their identities unknown or erased – and the mysterious pull this has on the public mind.
Jack retreats to an Airbnb cottage in a small coastal town. He knows straight away the space is right, but the decor probably needs destroying. “That’s his problem with the term reinvent. It suggests the previous self was a wreck. That s never true. But is there enough time for it? He knows this much: people forget time, but time does not forget them. Time is merciless.”
As well as encountering the town’s colourful inhabitants, Jack befriends Sarah, whose sister Alice is one of the many thousands of people who go missing every year. Over three months, it is here he intends to work on a book about what he thinks of as found bodies.
His research involves more than one person whose anonymous dead body was discovered on a beach, and the figure to whom his mind returns most often is the unknown man whose newly dead body was found leaning against the sea wall on Adelaide’s Somerton Beach in 1948.
Is there a danger in feeling self-important? What is the meaning of it all when a person vanishes? What, then, happens to those who are left behind? The fifth novel by Salom, who has twice been shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award, is an eerie yarn exploring the ideas of disappearance and loss.
