The Lost Dog
By Michelle de Kretser

Chatto & Windus

A.S. Byatt once told me that one of the best ghost stories ever written was “The Jolly Corner” by Henry James – that great master of fiction, always concerned with form and with the technical solution.  I read the intriguing story and was convinced it was the work of a genius.  It is the tale of Spencer Brydon who returns to New York after being away for a very long time.  Suspecting that a house he had inherited was haunted, he reverted to investigating the property at night, eventually encountering the ghostly apparition.  As Brydon had suspected the ghost was merely his alter ego – the successful businessman he might have become if he had not left New York. Curiously Michelle de Kretser has chosen to include this story in the Henry James biography her principle character is writing in her latest novel The Lost Dog.  It is a brilliant metaphor. De Kretser too encounters memories of an earlier life in her book.  She is a peculiarly gifted writer.  Her first novel The Rose Garden was published in 1999; and her last book The Hamilton Case was published in 2004.  The latter work, based on a factual 1930s unsolved murder case on the island of Ceylon where de Kretser was born, won a Commonwealth Writer’s Prize and the coveted Encore Award.  De Kretser doesn’t look back.  Or does she?  In The Lost Dog she discards her Dutch-Burgher Ceylonese colonial heritage and replaces it with Tom Loxley – a man displaced from an Anglo-Indian childhood to a fractious contemporary Melbourne art scene.  He works on his biography of Henry James and becomes involved with an elusive Chinese-Australian artist with a mysterious past.

Set in present-day Australia, Michelle de Kretser has woven a many layered tapestry of past and present behind the framework of a lost dog in the Australian bush.  Intriguing, menacing, haunting, poignant, de Kretser has created a love story mingling mystery and adventure with the pain of fractured relationships.  She is a skilful wordsmith – always searching for lost emotions, and never allowing us to get too close to the truth about the love relationship between her two main characters.

The device Henry James uses (The Art of the Novel, 1934), and the one most calculated to command the reader’s attention, is to adopt an indirect approach: i.e. to create a definite created sensibility interposed between the reader and the felt experience which is the subject of his fiction.  James never puts the reader in direct contact with his subjects, because his subject really was not what happened but what someone felt about what happened, and this could only be known through an intermediate intelligence.

De Kretser has not adopted quite such a devious and complex method of writing, but she must have studied something of James’ stream of composition to good effect.  I feel that de Kretser has moved into virgin territory – away from herself and autobiography and into a new technical and creative method of story telling.  She has raised herself to a higher phase – more dramatic and thematic, and never succumbing to platitudes of statement.  In The Lost Dog we as readers are never given all the facts, only enough to go on with.  She lets her story develop until it finds for itself the method which allows her to dramatise and shape it into its self sufficient form.  It is a clever technique - both entertaining and absorbing.  One yearns for more.