Books
Gail Jones
The Name of the Sister
Gail Jones is a prolific writer – her latest book, The Name of the Sister, is her 11th novel. Winner of The Age Book of the Year Award (Sixty Lights) and the Prime Minister’s Literary Award (The Death of Noah Glass), Jones’s work has also been recognised internationally: longlisted for the Booker Prize (Sixty Lights) and twice for the Orange Prize (Dreams of Speaking; Sorry).
Her new novel teases out tensions within the phenomenon of true crime, exploring the media, truth and justice, narrative closure and why we desire it, levels of power and how they are wielded, and how a childhood friendship endures while a marriage slowly dissolves in Sydney’s inner west.
Along with the rest of the country, Jones’s central character, freelance journalist Angie, becomes entranced by a woman she sees on television, a Jane Doe who appears like an apparition near Broken Hill, naked and with no memory of who she is or where she’s been. This “Unknown Woman” is unable to speak: “her empty blink recalled the clicking eyelids of old-fashioned dolls”. In a neat twist, Angie’s best friend from childhood, Bev, happens to be the chief investigator on the case and drip-feeds Angie juicy morsels of story as the mystery unfolds.
Angie begins to investigate Jane’s identity but her search shifts as she becomes more emotionally involved with those who contact Angie with their stories, already sure that Jane is their missing lover, sister, daughter, friend. They project their fierce wanting, hope and grief onto the blank canvas this woman represents: Jane becomes who they want her to be. At times this aspect recalls Richard Flanagan’s The Unknown Terrorist, whose central character, the Doll, also becomes buried under the sedimentary layers of other people’s fantasies and the shifting sands of fiction and the real.
Angie discusses the limitations of true crime narratives often as she gets more enmeshed in the case. Jones seems interested in what happens when you challenge and dismantle the genre. What if we find out who the Unknown Woman is and there are still no answers? What if the story becomes an anticlimax, a narrative chasing its own tail? The book’s challenge is to reveal Angie’s doubts while sustaining the narrative momentum, but Jones keeps it moving through a change of pace and place as Angie and Bev leave Sydney.
Jones spent some of her childhood in Kalgoorlie, and her evocation of Broken Hill – the lethargy, its harsh climate, the sexual politics within the police force, the rubbish tip that casts shadows over the town – becomes a potent force. It’s a landscape where there is no place to hide unless you are underground. A handwritten map that Angie discovers in the local museum offers valuable clues to the crime, while Mikey, the police “tech-head”, gets left behind, “busy clicking at the keyboard and expanding and contracting circumferences”.
Growing up in a small town, Angie and Bev were reliant on each other in a place where “status was linked to the role of the father (mothers, it seemed, didn’t count at all)”. The way they respond to the case and Jane’s violation, their deep understanding and occasional dismissal of each other’s nature and motivations, their shared “constitutional seriousness”, shapes what Jones reveals and keeps hidden from the reader. For Angie, trauma is compartmentalised: the real crime lies buried in her backyard. From childhood, she copes by developing a fascination with Egypt, the god Thoth and ibises that she still sees as sacred. When she becomes lost, Bev draws a hieroglyph in the red Broken Hill dirt to guide her.
As Angie becomes more interested in strangers’ stories about Jane, her relationship with her husband, Sam, starts to wane. A teacher reinvigorated by the chance to put on a school play, Hamlet, Sam brings the students over to their small terrace, excited by the possibilities, but a sudden tragedy exposes his vulnerabilities in new ways that neither can reconcile. Angie walks around the quiet bays near Glebe at night, deflecting the hurt. It is here that Jones’s writing truly shines: the everyday brutalities between lovers; the absent-minded absence of care; the death of a relationship played out between the sheets as Angie turns to the wall to sleep: “It was vast, really, all that their talks hid or omitted.”
Jones’s style is cool and refined, observational. There is plenty of nuance and the confidence to allow characters to develop quietly and carefully, without overstepping the boundaries of their lives. The novel offers rich overlapping worlds and dilemmas, with Jones throwing up many questions that give the reader pause and make us think through the answers.
Jones’s novel examines the ripple effects of the true crime genre and why people are drawn to such storytelling, a cultural landscape where people are hooked on podcasts and breaking news, tracing missing persons’ lives through social media and joining in as community detectives on Facebook groups. Why do people become fascinated by those without histories or memories, drawn to filling in the gaps? And why is it so important that the Unknown Woman is found – that finally she is claimed and named?
Text Publishing, 208pp, $34.99
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on June 7, 2025 as "The Name of the Sister".
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