Winner of the Prime Minister's Literary Award in 2019, Gail Jones' The Death of Noah Glass is a sumptuous, sensual work of fiction. It is not, as some might assume from the title or the blurb, a crime novel; it is — amongst other things — about the enduring power of art to make sense of our lives and the yearning for connection in the wake of bereavement.

'Intergenerational trauma' is a term that gets bandied about a bit these days, but this novel brings us the story of a man profoundly damaged by his experience as a POW of the Japanese, and how this impacted on his son Noah and thus his grandchildren Martin and Evie. On his postwar return to Australia, Joshua Glass took his family with him to a remote leprosarium in Western Australia where he ministered to the sick in the days when Hansen's disease meant desolate isolation and disfigurement. A doctor missionary working off some undisclosed debt of secret thanksgiving, he believed that faith and antibiotic breakthrough would keep his family beyond all harm.

It didn't protect his son Noah from psychological harm. Noah was traumatised by what he saw and his father's disconnect from his family.

Noah's sole consolation was a book:

In a dusty pile of books Noah found Great Art Museums of the World. It bore the fuzzy stamp of a library in suburban Melbourne, but ended up in his own hands and before his own astonished eyes, and lived under his pillow, a treasure, and a night window to elsewhere. This single book marked the arrival of exotic visions. Other worlds and times blazed as portents from the pages, drifting into focus, contained and set apart in a shiny strangeness. He stroked the glossy paper and studied the legends to the paintings as if his future life depended on it. (p.45)

Which it does. Noah welcomed escape to a boarding school where he excelled in maths and physics, but took Arts at university and became an art historian. When as a student on a visit to the National Gallery in London, he sees Piero della Francesca's The Nativity and interprets it as having a rare distinction because of the ordinariness and simplicity of its elements, (p.70) it is a catalyst for him to become a scholar of Piero's work, and later, when viewing The Baptism of Christ to formulate his theory about the instability of time in the Tuscan artist's work. (The figure awkwardly undressing on the RHS might be Christ preparing for his baptism.)

Noah is especially fascinated by the Prussian blue of Mary's robe under the infant Jesus, which becomes in turn the catalyst for him to teach his daughter Evie all the gradations of the colour blue. Because categories of things could be apprehended, she recites these into lists as a sort of talisman against the confusion and emotional pain of believing that Martin is the favourite child. For Evie, these lists are a repertoire of consoling images:

No real job, no prospects. But the afternoon by the harbour was magnificently colourful. Another kind of prospect. Evie set up a list: azurite, carmine, cerrusite [sic], cinnabar, cobalt, galena, graphite, gypsum, haematite, indigo, lapis lazuli, limonite, malachite, Naples yellow, orpiment, realgar, smalt, ultramarine, umber, vermilion, zincite... these were the fifteenth century pigments her father had taught her. (p.220)

(My father, who was a research scientist specialising in surface coatings i.e. paint, more prosaically taught me the names of the colours using house-paint sample cards! That was back in the days when they actually had the names of the colours e.g. cerise or cobalt, not silly names like 'Poor Knights' and 'Big Lagoon'.)

But Evie is wrong about her father's preference for Martin.

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2024/03/11/the-death-of-noah-glass-2018-by-gail-jones/ ( )

I was impressed by Our Shadows, so found Death of Noah Glass by the same author as my next read.
Gail Jones does not belong to the "show them, don't tell them" school of writing - she tells, and tells at considerable length! But in telling, she draws on the readers resources - you end up thinking a lot while you read her books. They're not page turners, but rewarding in a different way.
Death of Noah Glass is almost a whodunnit - but the result is about as far from that genre as is possible.
So, intellectual reading, thought provoking, and made to be enjoyed slowly. Good stuff. ( )

‘Martin asked Evie to tell him about Noah’s theories of painting and time…. He heard “multiplicity, not unity”; he heard “co-presence of the finite and the infinite”; he heard her say something about serial time giving way to curves and bending motions. He could understand nothing.’

Ekphrasis: a literary device in which a painting, sculpture, or other work of visual art is described. That’s what struck me about this compelling, well-written novel about the Glass family. Noah Glass, late 60s and an art history scholar, is found dead, floating in the swimming pool of his apartment complex. After the funeral his two children, Evie – who has been drifting aimlessly and now works in a bookstore – and Martin – an artist – are asked to come to the local police station where Detective Malone informs them that Noah was a suspect in an art theft, where a statue has gone missing from Sicily. This, then, is the basic premise and Martin takes it upon himself to travel out to Palermo to seek answers for himself.

The novel is structured in a subtle way that overlays time and place; it switches between Evie in Sydney, now working as a visual film-interpreter for a blind client called Benjamin, for whom she starts to have romantic feelings, and Martin in Palermo as he uncovers secrets and lies in the Sicilian capital, getting involved in the life of his father’s former mistress and the local mafia. A third strand takes us back in time to Noah’s life and how he came to be involved with Dora Caselli. These shifts are expertly done by Gail Jones, as events, location and even the weather allow her to make connections – as the opening extract says, time giving way to curves. If it is raining when we are in Evie’s chapters, then it is also raining in Palermo in Martin’s; as Martin leaves a café so too, in the next chapter, does Noah leave a café 30 years earlier. And throughout the book there are the paintings, each of which add layers of meaning and detail to the story. I have to say I did find myself being distracted and having to go off to look up images of each work of art mentioned, but that allows you time to absorb the meanings and connections.

This is a subtle exploration of grief, of loss and of two lost souls – Evie and Martin – trying to rebuild lives that, even before their father’s death, had been broken. Events cause them to recover childhood memories, there is mention of Martin’s previous drug problems, and Martin has to also come to terms with his failed marriage. Two of the minor characters – Benjamin, and Martin’s daughter Nina – are, perhaps, less subtle: he is blind, she is deaf, both somehow being a metaphor for being closed off from something. When Nina is given cochlear implants, she is terrified of this sudden, alien world: ‘the thunder of surround sound’. I say ‘less subtle’ for, while it’s clear what Jones is trying to say, it just seems a little too obvious compared to the intricacies of the rest of the book. Almost unnoticed, the book shifts in the last chapter to the present tense – I have to admit I missed this at first – and the ending is suitably ambiguous, as Martin and Evie ponder their new lives: ‘”I don’t know,” says Evie, in response to his question. “Non lo so.”’ But we don’t know what his question was, and we don’t get an answer. We, like the characters, are left on the edge of an uncertain future.

Gail Jones deserves to be better known, and this is a well-crafted, beautifully written meditation on art, life and relationships. 4 excellent stars. ( )

While Noah Glass's two adult children are still making funeral plans and coming to terms with the sudden death of their father, the police arrive to let them know that he is suspected of having stolen an Italian statue. Noah Glass was an art historian and he had recently been in Palermo, but his area of expertise was far removed from the relatively recent sculpture and his personal views made such an accusation unthinkable to his children. Evie, who has traveled to Sydney from her home in Melbourne and is staying in her father's apartment, isn't interested in the subject, but Martin, a divorced father and artist, can't get it out of his mind. So he goes to Palermo, determined to find answers.

The Death of Noah Glass takes each of the three characters, Noah, Evie and Martin, and spends alternating chapters with each of them as they are pulled into environments that challenge and stretch them, even as they come to terms with the past. This is a quiet, but gorgeously told story of family. Gail Jones's writing here reminded me of Anne Tyler's best work, with its tight focus on family ties and reliance on good writing and complex and nuanced characters to tell the story. ( )