FICTION
Cool Water
Myfanwy Jones
Hachette, $32.99

Myfanwy Jones’ third novel explores inherited damage through three generations of fathers, spanning the 1950s to now. It drills down, excavating layers – from malicious violence and coercion in the first generation, to dysregulated explosions of feeling and defensive withdrawal in later ones. And it poses crucial questions. How do we transcend the scars of the past? Is healing possible?

North Queensland’s Tinaroo Dam, the novel’s setting, is as important as any of its characters, and extends its exploration of damage to the environment, with Australian colonisation and its “civilising” drive as the perpetrator. The dam and the Herbert men symbolise humans’ “genius for self-destruction”.

Jones’ exploration of grief, loss and recovery through a novel intricately knitted to place builds on her earlier work. In the Miles Franklin shortlisted Leap (2015), its inner-Melbourne characters fight loss through parkour and tigers, and in The Rainy Season (2009), a Vietnam trip is haunted by an absent father.

Cool Water is a smooth read, thanks to its finely polished prose and a seamless structure that feels inevitable – but it’s quietly ambitious, too. Every element has a purpose. In 1956, “horribly handsome” butcher Victor Herbert terrorises his “accident-prone” family, but calculatedly charms the “makeshift” town created to build Tinaroo Dam, then Queensland’s most ambitious infrastructure project to date.

Over one year, sensitive 12-year-old Joe, Victor’s “least favourite” son, learns terrible lessons about vulnerability and connection. In a parallel narrative, over a present-day weekend, Joe’s son Frank (who knows him as a rage-prone “withholding bastard”) returns to Tinaroo for his daughter’s wedding, 18 months after Joe’s death.

Proud townspeople venerated the dam as “God’s work” and an enterprising example of “Man versus Nature” during its construction. But in the present-day narrative, it’s a sterile, quarter-full “portrait of drought”, choked with blue-green algae, stocked with fish that can’t reproduce in its waters – and it has damaged the river system it diverted, originally for tobacco farming.

Evelyn, the beautiful, shorts-wearing artist wife of the dam’s chief engineer, is the novel’s only substantial female narrator. She counts Joe, delivery boy for her husband’s local paper, as her best friend, and nurtures his softest self. She’s also the only person to bring out any redeeming qualities in the villainous Victor, who muses she’s “the only woman he has ever wanted to see him in return”.