SA JONES Isabelle of the Moon & Stars. Reviewed by Deborah J Sheil

A young woman searches for peace of mind as a past trauma refuses to stay buried in SA Jones’s new novel. Isabelle is a data analyst in the corporate world in Perth. After a promising start in the company, she is effectively derailed by an embarrassing mental meltdown during an important corporate presentation. After several months off work on stress leave, she returns to her job but is acutely aware that her work life is now meaningless and on ‘an underwhelming career trajectory’. She has lost her confidence and her drive and seems to be marking time, performing useless duties for her boss, Jack, who perpetuates the pointlessness of her job because he is attracted to her. It is a secret between them as Isabelle responds to his advances in an effort to exorcise her demons. She tries, but fails, to numb her growing disquiet. She is aware of Jack’s marriage but uncaring as she considers how to take what she can get in an effort to fill an emotional void, a void created after ‘the incident’. An unexpected friendship with an elderly neighbour, Mrs Graham, inspires Isabelle to throw an Australia Day party on the rooftop of her block of flats. Isabelle is momentarily deflected from her troubles and is motivated to bring together all the other tenants in a community social event to watch the Australia Day fireworks. As well as Mrs Graham, she asks her best friend Evan to help her organise it. However, it becomes apparent that the rooftop is deeply connected to her trauma, a place from her recent past that was a site of grief and deep despair. The rooftop party becomes a symbolic gesture to shake off the memory of that trauma and shift the malaise which periodically paralyses her. The preparations for the party, both practical and emotional, prove to be more challenging than she had thought, and we are introduced for the first time to the ‘naming’ of her anguish: ‘the Black Place’. The rooftop becomes a metaphor for her trauma; first the setting for her first meeting with that powerful entity, the Black Place; then a sanctuary and refuge from the all-consuming dark veil of depression and now, via the Australia Day party, the means by which she can banish it. So she thinks. But her resolve weakens under the weight of the memory, of ‘the incident’. Privately she doubts her ability to pull it off. The only way she can deal with her endless prevarication about the party is to surrender to her instincts and crash head-first into consummating a sexual liaison with Jack, her boss: ‘The attraction … is stirring like a bear waking from a long, hard winter.’ This liaison is an awkward, deeply unsatisfactory and shallow encounter, failing to provide shelter from the Black Place, which continues to cast shadows. What it does do, in fact, is to expose that raw memory, the source of her past trauma, (‘the incident’), which her friend Evan helped her recover from. And it is with Evan that she now takes refuge. Evan has made a private deal with God to remain celibate in gratitude for an epiphany he experienced while praying after the death of his father. Evan is a staunch friend and ‘safe’, which allows them to be close without any ambiguous sexual tension. He hovers around the periphery of Isabelle’s life, always looking out for her, but Isabelle is too immersed in her own despair to notice clues about his own conflicted desires:

The entire rooftop is carpeted with petals. Not an anaemic, wedding-celebration sprinkling of petals, but an ankle-deep pool of red and white petals across the entire space. She slips her shoes off and takes a few steps. The petals are soft and cool. They dance around her ankles … Evan has detonated the wasteland with thousands upon thousands of petals piled thick on the no-longer-visible rooftop.

The party is a success. In the buoyant mood that follows, Evan abandons his pact with God and he and Isabelle become lovers. But Isabelle is haunted by the knowledge that her ex-fiancé Karl, her nemesis, has married the woman he left Isabella for, information Evan has recently revealed. Now that she has lost Evan as her best friend – he has become Evan, her lover – she is thrown into more confusion and turmoil.  She goes to Prague, a place we know she is obsessed with:

Evan asks, ‘Why are you so fascinated by Prague?’

Isabelle brushes off any significance. ‘Chance. Alignment of the stars. Chemistry. No reason at all.’

Secretly she thinks, ‘Somewhere between prayer and plague, a fitting place for me.’ But as a child she was enchanted with an image from the Christmas carol, ‘Good King Wenceslas’.

She doesn’t tell Evan that when Karl left she had the image on constant rotation in her head. That she comforts herself with it when the Black Place has laid waste to her once again.

As hot and bright as Perth was, Prague is the opposite. It is grey with history. Isabelle sleeps, doesn’t eat, ignores emails from Evan (which plot the painfully honest trajectory of his thoughts), trawls the streets, visits churches, halls, parks, places where evil deeds were committed, and meets street people. She drifts, in and out of places and thoughts and memory. She begins to heal, left alone in a strange place, free of the usual distractions. She begins to exorcise the demons:

She has the strange but persistent feeling that some force hovers nearby. Not the Black Place. Something else. It waits, benign but powerful.

The premise of the story is plausible. The character of Isabelle is drawn with enough complexity and substance to make her interesting as we follow the narrative across multiple settings. We hear her internal voice; we empathise with her inner journey. The Prague setting provides an interesting counterpoint to the eternally sunny west coast of Australia, and a symbolically dark and bleak landscape upon which to explore Isabelle’s dismantling of her demons. But as the antagonists of the story, Jack and Karl are not developed well enough to make their characters substantial or authentic. They are meant to be portrayed as weak and shallow but even villains have hidden depths. Evan is more developed but I was not completely convinced by his ‘pact with God’ as played out in the story – his unbridled lust had to come out of somewhere. This is an interesting, well-written exploration of how anxiety and trauma can cripple and disable a person, but there are no particularly fresh insights. It could be argued that ‘the incident’ doesn’t carry sufficient weight to justify such an anguished journey of soul-searching and that the new relationship between Evan and Isabelle is a little too predictable and convenient. However the author’s descriptive writing confidently carries the narrative along and the novel is a satisfying and enjoyable read. SA Jones Isabelle of the Moon & Stars UWA Publishing 2014 PB 320pp $27.99 Deborah J Sheil is a semi-retired teacher currently completing an Associate Degree in Creative Writing at SCU Lismore. You can buy this book from Abbey’s at a 10% discount by quoting the promotion code NEWTOWNREVIEW here or you can buy it from Booktopia here. To see if it is available from Newtown Library, click here.

Tags: Australian women's fiction, SA | Jones