ANGELA O’KEEFFE Phantom Days. Reviewed by Ann Skea

The new novel from the award-winning author of The Sitter brings a book to life – a book that is sentient, observant, and full of opinions.

This is an ordinary story, as all stories are. The story of Isabel and me. I would call it a love story but … love is not quite right.
 

This is the first story I have ever read where one of the main characters is a book. It is no ordinary book: it can see, hear, and speak; it has feelings and emotions; and it has a sort of ESP. Put down on a mantelpiece next to a metal box containing a woman’s ashes, it listens to her story. What she tells it is not what her son, Lewis, believes about her death.

Lewis is one of the characters in Phantom Days, and we hear of him through others, especially Isabel, who bought Book on an impulse, before flying to London to join him.

‘I’m going to London next week,’ she tells her mother, Maggie:

‘For work?’

‘For sex.’

‘Who are you going with?’

‘Lewis.’

You haven’t known him long.’

‘So?’

Isabel and Maggie share the story with Book in alternating chapters. All this initially seems like an unlikely scenario, but Angela O’Keeffe makes all her characters interesting and there is an element of uncertainty and suspense, and sheer oddity, that makes this book compelling.

‘A book comes into the world knowing it is a saviour of sorts,’ says Book, introducing itself. And, somehow, it wants to save Isabel.

In London, while Lewis is at a conference, Isabel visits the Tate Modern to see the Rothko room. She has been there before, but she recently read about Rothko and that he had specially designed this room to house the murals he had painted, on commission, for a New York restaurant. He had pulled out of that commission, and Isabel was shocked to read that

on the very day in 1970 that the paintings were delivered to the Tate, Rothko was found dead in his studio in New York. He’d overdosed on barbiturates and slashed an artery in his right arm.

Isabel remembers that Rothko’s son had said ‘the colours are like the inside of the body, deep aubergines the colour of organs and reds the colours of blood’. Looking at them now, she feels their ‘dreamy’, magnetic beauty, but she can’t get rid of the image of Rothko lying in a pool of his blood ‘just as the canvases were starting their new lives in this room’.

The violence of this image haunts her throughout the book.

On their last day in London, after a hotel breakfast at which Isabel has to jolly Lewis out of a childish mood, and later, when there is an incident as she and Lewis board a crowded London Underground train, Isabel begins to doubt if Lewis is all she believes him to be. Throughout their days in London she has felt unsettled. And, oddly, she talks to the book about this, telling it she was ‘still looking to him’ [Lewis] for a clue to the strange way she felt.

Although she has only briefly opened the book, the author had signed it for her and both she and Book feel that they belong together.

I imagine you remember the tiny crack of your spine as your pages parted …

I’d like to say that this was the moment you entered my life – my inner life, that is. But as I began to read, I had the impression that something was being thwarted – in me or in you, it was hard to say. Other than your title, A New Step, I absorbed not one word of what I read.

Book had felt violence when Isabel had briefly opened it and then quickly closed it when Lewis appeared: ‘To be shut is a violence,’ it remarks. But all the time Isabel and Lewis are together, it watches and listens to all that happens between them – ‘A witness to those days.’ It hears Lewis ask Isabel who she loves most in the world, and Isabel’s reply – ‘My mother, Maggie.’

Maggie, who is widowed, had been diagnosed with breast cancer the previous year, and although they live separately, Isabel has been caring for her.

Back in Sydney, Isabel decides to stop meeting Lewis, but in their shared taxi from the airport she accidentally leaves Book behind and Lewis picks it up. In Sydney, too, Isabel has the feeling that something is growing inside her – a ‘curious light’ that was growing ‘with her every breath’. She takes a pregnancy test and it is positive, but she has been told by doctors that she would never fall pregnant. Much to her grief, because she had wanted this curious light to ‘have a place in the world’, it turns out to be a phantom pregnancy.

Maggie is recovering from a double mastectomy. Now, as she lies in ‘corpse pose’ at her yoga class, she thinks of the day of the operation and how she had looked at herself naked in a changing-room mirror: ‘full length presumably so that patients could properly farewell whatever part of them was about to be cut off, she thought’. She remembers how she was overcome with grief. But she tells Isabel on the phone that she’s ‘fine’, and when Isabel tells her about the phantom pregnancy, she tries to understand.

‘So, what happens now? Does it just … go away?’

She’d heard of phantom pregnancy, but she knew little about it. How long would it last? Isabel had said the doctor didn’t know why it happened, but surely it was psychological. Isabel was sensitive, always had been.

But she can see that Isabel’s belly has grown, and she is shocked and saddened. She fills her days with ordinary things that are no longer ordinary. Her hair, which had fallen out due to chemotherapy, is just growing back.

She’d waited months after the first new shoots of hair had appeared before she’d gone for her first haircut. Afterwards she’d called her sister, Danielle, who lived in Adelaide.

‘I had a disaster at the hairdressers.’

‘Oh?’

She pictured Danielle, who was a couple of years younger than her, leaning in, as she had as a child whenever Maggie had whispered a secret in her ear.

‘I asked for a Twiggy, but I ended up with Liberace.’

Danielle laughed. ‘Oh no.’

‘You might think that nobody could make hair this short bouffy. But you’d be wrong,’ Maggie said.

On a bus, she hears two women discussing Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. She buys the book, takes it home, and begins to read it. She had first read it ‘decades ago’ and she remembers the axe murder of the old woman, and Dostoevsky’s own experience of being sentenced to death, stood before a firing squad, then, at the last minute, being granted a reprieve. Earlier that day she had watched from her window as her next-door neighbour wielded an axe to chop wood. Now, she remembers Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov as he walks to the old woman’s door, rehearsing his next visit when he will murder her with an axe, and she is startled by a sudden knock on her own door. A strange man stands there, but he introduces himself as Lewis, and he has Isabel’s book in his hand.

Book listens to their conversation and remembers Lewis asking Isabel who she loves most in the world. It feels a sense of danger.

So, the scene is set for drama. To reveal what happens, and what part Book plays in it, would be a spoiler, but Book ends up on a road, wondering if its author lies with it. As it tells us in the first chapter:

here is a little-known fact about authors: they lay themselves down in the middle of the road, quite prepared to be run over by a car, or picked apart by birds, all for the sake of a book, but at the last moment, when they must surely be flattened or picked apart, they stand up and walk away. And the book is left alone.

But Phantom Days could soon be in your hands, ready to tell you its own ‘ordinary’ but strange tale.

Angela O’Keeffe Phantom Days UQP 2026 176pp $29.99

Dr Ann Skea is a freelance reviewer, writer and an independent scholar of the work of Ted Hughes. She is author of Ted Hughes: The Poetic Quest (UNE 1994, and currently available for free download here). Her work is internationally published and her Ted Hughes webpages (ann.skea.com) are archived by the British Library.

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Tags: Angela | O'Keefe, Australian fiction, Australian women writers, books, speculative fiction