Book of the day: Phantom Days by Angela O’Keeffe

A book beginning with a book. And that book is a narrator – one of the three main voices in this modest but memorable novel by prize-winning Australian author Angela O’Keeffe. The others are Isabel, the buyer of the book, and her mother, Maggie. Book tells us of being purchased, signed by the author and taken home by Isabel, who is about to leave Sydney for London to meet her lover, Lewis. Both Book and Isabel recount the days in London, Book in Isabel’s shoulder bag as she wanders in galleries and parks, meets Lewis for lunches, spends the afternoons in bed. The last day brings, for Isabel, the first hint of his obsessive and controlling nature but also an awareness of a “growing strangeness, a kind of weightless presence” within her – a light.

Once they are back in Sydney, Isabel ends the relationship but discovers she is pregnant, which she has always been told was impossible. There is, however, no child. This is a phantom pregnancy, very rare, but medically acknowledged.

Book, left behind by mistake in the taxi on the journey from the airport, is now in Lewis’s apartment, sitting on the mantelpiece, next to a metal box. This contains the ashes of Lewis’s mother, and she has a disturbing story to tell – one that illuminates her son’s troubling personality.

One of the novel’s many strengths is the character of Maggie, who now takes up her role in the story. She’s smart, vital, a courageous survivor of the sudden early death of her husband and, more recently, of cancer. The depiction of the mother-daughter relationship catches exactly the right blend of occasional exasperation and irritation, humour and deep love. O’Keeffe is excellent, too, at depicting Lewis’s behaviour, as sulkiness escalates to threat. She also conveys a strong sense of Sydney’s streets, buildings and weather.

Not everything about Phantom Days works. The notion of Book as a sentient being doesn’t entirely convince, and the device of the speaking ashes providing the Lewis backstory is a little creaky, but the novel subtly takes hold to compel attention and remain in the mind. In fiction as closely focused as this, and as comparatively brief (176 pages) the writing must, and should, come under scrutiny. O’Keeffe largely passes the test. There are some memorable sentences. Of Maggie, she writes, “She’d lived in one country of herself up until the day of her diagnosis and then was cast into another.” There is this, too: “Children are the original spies. Storing what they witness.” Sometimes, though, she misses the mark and can waft into imprecision: “Her skin gleamed with oblivion.” And the eventually revealed title of Book, A New Step, seems a trifle obvious.

In a novel that says so much about the power of writing and the strong connection between a book and its reader, there are some wryly accurate comments about the literary process: “But here is a little-known fact about authors: they lay themselves down in the middle of the road, quite prepared to be run over by a car, or picked apart by birds, all for the sake of the book, but at the last moment, when they must surely be flattened or picked apart, they stand and walk away. And the book is left alone.”

Jane Austen famously depicted her work as writing on a little bit of ivory two inches wide. Angela O’Keeffe is not Austen but, like her, she understands that quiet intelligence, attention to detail and elegant, thoughtful prose can be just as effective as what Walter Scott called “the big bow wow”.