Questions of Travel (Michelle de Kretser, A&U)

Questions of Travel is the fourth novel from Michelle de Kretser, who, I think it’s safe to say, is no longer a rising star but one of Australia’s finest literary authors, and a previous winner of the Commonwealth Writers Prize. The size of the author’s name on the cover suggests the publisher thinks so too.

The novel’s dual narrative follows two characters, Laura and Ravi, over the course of several decades, from the late 20th century to the early 21st. In Sydney, Laura grows up in a wealthy but unhappy family, briefly studying art at university before heading off to travel the world. She waits tables in London, teaches English in Naples, and finally returns to Sydney to work
in publishing.

In a beachside suburb of Sri Lanka, Ravi dreams of overseas travel, but the possibility seems unlikely. He settles in Colombo with his wife and young son, where he works as a maths teacher and dabbles in IT and web design, while his wife becomes increasingly active in Sri Lankan politics. Tragedy forces him to flee his country and seek asylum in Australia, where he waits for his visa and makes modest attempts to build a new life.

Essentially this is a story about two common, but very different, experiences of modern travel—an Australian backpacker exploring the world and a Sri Lankan refugee adjusting to Australia—and de Kretser unpicks her characters’ experiences, motivations and emotions with great insight and skill. While Laura and Ravi grow up dreaming of travel, as adults they soon realise that the experience can be deeply lonely. One of Laura’s first revelations about travel is the ‘sheer tedium of being a tourist’. ‘Seeing how local people lived was a myth’, she also soon discovers.

The modern office environment also comes under scrutiny. When she returns to Sydney, Laura works for a trendy travel publisher, and de Kretser’s descriptions of laid-back managers and petty office politics had me nodding my head and laughing out loud. (De Kretser worked for Lonely Planet at one time—she must have been taking notes.) The humour is important, as it prevents the story from becoming too bleak (and there are some very bleak moments). However, what stood out the most was de Kretser’s beautiful language. ‘Self-invention was poetry written to an energetic beat with rhyme’s confidence in endings; in that sense, it resembled love.’ Sentences like that demand re-reading.

Questions of Travel combines the ambitious themes of Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom with the poetic details of Gail Jones’ Five Bells. And the prose will knock your socks off.

Andrea Hanke is the editor of Bookseller+Publisher

Category: Reviews