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Review
'powerful moments' --Financial Times
`Jones's writing has the intensity of a dream, and the pattern she makes of the characters' lives is beautiful, managing to combine tension with lyricism' --The Times
`Over the past decade Gail Jones has established herself as a significant presence in contemporary Australian fiction. Thoughtful, intelligent and intensely lyrical, Five Bells is likely to consolidate an already considerable literary reputation' --The Guardian
`A story peopled by achingly real characters, memorably related in delicate, ornate prose, and throbbing with loss' --The Independent on Sunday
`Engaging and passionate'
--Aesthetica, Shirley Stevenson
`Jones's writing has the intensity of a dream, and the pattern she makes of the characters' lives is beautiful, managing to combine tension with lyricism' --The Times
`Over the past decade Gail Jones has established herself as a significant presence in contemporary Australian fiction. Thoughtful, intelligent and intensely lyrical, Five Bells is likely to consolidate an already considerable literary reputation' --The Guardian
`A story peopled by achingly real characters, memorably related in delicate, ornate prose, and throbbing with loss' --The Independent on Sunday
`Engaging and passionate'
--Aesthetica, Shirley Stevenson
Book Description
A deeply moving novel about love and loss and the burdens of the past which explores the lives of four people bound together by a single dramatic event.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
In her acknowledgments Gail Jones says her first debt is to Kenneth Slesser's elegiac poem Five Bells (1939). I found it very worthwhile reading this poem, after finishing her book also entitled Five Bells, as there are shards of the poem in the author's own work.
The novel is elegiac and the writing lyrical. Based around Circular Quay, with the backdrop of Sydney Harbour Bridge and the luminous presence of the Opera House, the story is told of four people, over the course of one day. Apart from two of the characters they are strangers to each other and yet, throughout the book, there are little coincidences that link them together. Australia, with its complicated and ambivalent history, seems a brilliant setting for these four people who have each suffered loss and are burdened by their past.
My main criticisms are twofold. Firstly the predictable resolving of one of the characters and then there is the fifth character, a child. Unless I've missed something I think the lives of the four main characters would have been changed, anyway, without this extra event.
But this is just a niggle. Overall I found the novel moving, haunting and somewhat surreal.
The novel is elegiac and the writing lyrical. Based around Circular Quay, with the backdrop of Sydney Harbour Bridge and the luminous presence of the Opera House, the story is told of four people, over the course of one day. Apart from two of the characters they are strangers to each other and yet, throughout the book, there are little coincidences that link them together. Australia, with its complicated and ambivalent history, seems a brilliant setting for these four people who have each suffered loss and are burdened by their past.
My main criticisms are twofold. Firstly the predictable resolving of one of the characters and then there is the fifth character, a child. Unless I've missed something I think the lives of the four main characters would have been changed, anyway, without this extra event.
But this is just a niggle. Overall I found the novel moving, haunting and somewhat surreal.
1 of 2 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
An excellent read, clever without being pretentious and literary without being blue-stocking. Bought it following a recommendation in the Guardian's Saturday review. Now looking forward to reading more of her work.
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
1 review
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful
Great writing
21 April 2011
Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase
This was a lovely read. It has beautiful descriptions of Sydney Harbour, The Opera house and Circular Quay. The reader enters into the contrasting lives of the four people whose lives coincide when they visit the Quay on the same day but for very different reasons.One becomes involved in their lives and goes on thinking about them after finishing the book.
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