Richard Aidey

Lisa was an only child, and this fact was believed by onlookers to account for her general queerness.

Her father was a compositor on the Herald and was rarely to be seen, generally arriving home in the wee small hours, sleeping till the afternoon and going off to a pub to drink beer for an hour or so until it was time to go to work.

During his waking hours on Saturday, he glued himself to the wireless to listen to the racing, having placed several off-course bets.

Mrs. Miles had not the slightest idea of the size of his salary and would have been stunned if anyone had told her.

If she had known how great a proportion of it ended up in the pockets of the off-course bookmakers, she would have fainted dead away.

So that kind of sums them up.

We learn his name is Ed.

And somewhere in this novel, we learn Mrs. Marr's name, but I cannot remember it.

And I think it's only mentioned once.

And I think it's quite deliberate.

She's almost a cipher.

All of her dreams for what her life would have been are about her daughter.

And it's actually explicitly said not long after the bit I've just read you, she was the apple of her eye.

Again and again, it's, I mean, I won't go into full volume on this until perhaps a bit later, but the economy of this writing's extraordinary.

And the tone that she maintains throughout pulls you in and keeps you going and has you engaged, if you're me anyway, from the first page.

But she does so much with so little, so often throughout this book.

Sydney's not quite a character.

You know, in some novels, the place is a character.

But you're right, the descriptions of Sydney, they remind you of how beautiful it is and how beautiful it was back then.

And I'm thinking this Sydney Harbour wouldn't have had the thing that we see the most of apart from the bridge, which is the Opera House, because it didn't exist then.