FICTION
Cherrywood
Jock Serong
Fourth Estate, $34.99

Sometimes an epigraph tells you exactly what to expect in a book, and how to expect it. Cherrywood has a doozy, taken from Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities: “Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears.” Such is the curious admixture of Jock Serong’s new novel, a fiction about cities both stable and shifting, filled with figures drowning in love and overwhelmed with sorrow, moving to and fro across the 20th century.

It’s 1916, the birth of a new era, and in that dazzling invention, the motor car, the young Thomas Wrenfether is thrown from a crash that claims the lives of his parents. The inheritor of a great fortune, Wrenfether finds success and a happy marriage until both are placed under strain through a proposal made by his colleague and fellow board member, Ximenon. With 300 tonnes of high-quality cherry wood obtained somewhat mysteriously from the Caucasus, Ximenon proposes the construction of a paddle steamer in a land still open to investment and construction, a city comically distant and unimaginable to the Edinburgh-based businessmen: Melbourne.

It’s 1993, and on her way to a dinner party, a young, ambitious and temporarily forgetful Melbourne lawyer named Martha asks her taxi driver to pull over so she might quickly jump out and get a bottle of wine from a pub’s bottle shop. Pausing only a short time within, it’s nonetheless time enough to be struck by the pub’s uniquely panelled interior and the manner of the young man behind the bar.

Next morning, keen to return to the pub that impressed her in that fleeting moment, Martha smooths out the brown paper bag that once held the bottle, seeing no address and only a single name with which to begin her search: Cherrywood.

This is a novel of connections: some that seem immediately apparent, some that take the novel’s length to reveal themselves. Serong deftly doles out his revelations at a careful speed, but the effect never feels withholding or cynical – this isn’t a “puzzle novel” in which foregrounded narrative trickery supplants character. Instead, the relentless toggling back and forth builds a romantic, sustaining vision.

Serong maintains a careful handle on this balance – for the novel’s first half, the crosshatching of past and present and the connections within are carefully hinted at, with the novel’s prose and inventions remaining sturdily realist.

It’s only in the second half, after this careful work has been done, that a more fantastical sensibility emerges. While the 1993 chapters operate in a slightly looser style, full of the simultaneous crudity and energy of the modern era, the 1910s chapters are more effectively mannered and restrained. Serong is particularly evocative on the pains of distance and absence – so much in these pages feels on the verge of collapse, compromised at every turn with possible failure. Rarely is historical fiction this fraught and alive.