words that linger

I am reading a book at the moment; Sixty Lights by Gail Jones. It's not a very thick book, quite slim actually, but it's taking me ages to read. Like a fudgy chocolate pudding, it's delicious and satisfying in so many ways, but you have to eat it slow and only take little bits at a time, or it all gets too much.

The language and words used are so syrupy, fluid, eloquent and beautiful, that if you take in too much at once you lose the grace and beauty in the volume. Fortunately the chapters are only a few pages each; the book, aware of it’s richness, sets its own pace.


It started out in a sad way. Two children, recently orphaned, coming to terms with what it all means:

…Thomas and Lucy existed in a state of effacement and disability, as though they shared an undiagnosable illness. A kind of anaesthetic quality smothered their experience; they were disengaged in each task they performed, and their feelings, such as they were, were delayed and denuded. Moreover, the children had become convinced that there were ghosts in the house, presences that seemed everywhere to call: behold me! At night they saw flitting shapes and weird transparencies. Noises like whispers filled up the darkness. Once Thomas swore he saw his father’s face – unshaven, eyes bloodshot – hovering on the surface of the hallway mirror; and Lucy dreamed that the baby that would have been their sister was crawling in the cramped, dark space beneath her bed. There was no vacancy to grief. There was instead these drastic invasions, that hung omnipresent in the air itself.


The bit I’m up to now is more positive, their lives being rebuilt with freshness and wonder. Their Uncle collects them to take them back to his home in England:

When they were at last on the ship together, up high at the rusty, red-painted railing, Lucy and Thomas stood hand in hand – in biographical reversal and repetition – as Honoria and Neville had once done, approaching their New Beginning. Thomas pointed out that there were lovers shining mirrors at each other, one on the dock and one not far from them on the deck. It was the woman who was leaving. She tilted her oval mirror to catch the sun and a young man, diminishing, answered from the shore. Lucy was transfixed. This was what she wanted, a photosensitive departure. Light trained by glass to locate and discover a face, a beam to travel on, a homing device, a sleek corridor through the infinity of sky itself.


Isn’t it lovely? I'm only half way through, but each time I read a bit more I relish it, like sneaking an expensive chocolate from a box and nibbling at it in a way that makes one mouthful last and linger.