Robert Lukens

There are four of us in this discussion.

There's me, Cassie McCullough, novelist Robert Lukens, and literary academic Bernadette Brennan.

And when we were deciding which books to discuss in the Book Club series, Bernadette said that this book was right at the top of her list of essential Australian fiction.

Why, though?

But Bernadette, one of those people who we meet very early on is a man called Ted Tice, who becomes a very important character through the whole book.

But in the second chapter, in one line, Shirley Hazard says, Ted Tice will later take his own life.

And that's just left there.

And then the story goes on and it's not explained and it's never even entirely revealed, even in the final pages.

of the book.

What does the way that she drops these little details tell us about how she writes, how she tells stories?

Is Caro instead the hero of the book?

But more and more though, as I made my way through this book, she's demanding of us that we are not easy readers.

You have to pay attention, even on a sentence level, to find out not just what's going on, but to understand the images and the writing.

There are many, many sentences that stop me in my tracks.

Perhaps we could bring Robert in on there.

What did it mean to read this novel?

this is i've only read the transit of venus once and like you robert i kept on reading other people writing about shirley hazard including michelle de kretz's wonderful book in the writers on writers series and it's all about what you miss the first time or even sometimes not even just what you miss but what you resist

And I think that's quite a statement, isn't it, Bernadette, to insist that somebody puts their effort into reading.

I'm liking your image of it as a painting and particularly the things that happen in the corner.

And there's another moment in a corner with the character of Dora, who is the sister of the half-sister, who's a pretty unpleasant character.