Peggy Frew

A softly beautiful read.

Frew's prose is meditative and nuanced, elegant but not extravagant. Structured around the disappearance of a teenage girl on Victoria's Philip Island, Islands veers forward and backward in time, from generation to generation and back again, exploring the relationships and interconnections of those left behind.

In a sense, Islands feels like a very tightly woven collection of short stories. The grandmother reflects on her own youth; various Christmases are contrasted with purely the facts of the gifts given and meals eaten; paintings by the surviving sister are catalogued; Anna's parents experience their courtship, their marriage, their separation, and their longer recriminations.

It's fair to say that the novel is a dense read, and a confusing one for the first hundred pages or so. This is the kind of book where the novelist herself would have required a detailed timeline, and been researching her own work as she moved toward its completion. For some, this will be a disincentive, and certainly I found myself floundering in the early chapters, primarily due to Frew's style, both sparse and poetic, that asks the reader to meet her more than halfway.

Yet as the piece goes on, and the connections between characters are clarified, Frew's vision of a family inhabiting the same physical location but separated by time or motivation becomes deeply poignant. She is a sensitive writer; her dialogue is underwritten but without the spiritual emptiness that can accompany the modern trend for strict realism in speech; her adjectives and verbs always feel specific but never forced; her moments of literary excesses (turning one chapter into an art catalogue, for example) fit naturally within the broader structure.

Islands is not a cheery read, but it's certainly a satisfying one.… (more)