Amanda Lohrey makes writing look easy: Every sentence is a joy to read. Her characters instantly come to life on the page. You feel like you know them and suspect that you are privy to some of their secrets.
Zoe North, the main character in Lohry’s ninth novel, the transferremembers the first time she and her husband, Nick Whitelaw, drove to a deconsecrated country church with a “For Sale Planted in Front of Tall Fence” sign.
Zoe is a retired lawyer. Nick is a therapist who uses unconventional treatment methods. “He still had it, a 63-year-old man with a certain charisma,” Zoe says of her husband. “He was thin and well-built, and his short gray curls gave him a Roman look, like one of those busts in a museum. And after all these years, she still secretly enjoyed looking at him.”
The couple lost money in a financial crisis, sold their federal home and are looking to move to “one of those charming little towns” where they can afford it. “She was gasping for breath, bleeding money,” Zoe recalls of the economic collapse. It was a strange sensation; Until then she thought she had blood running through her veins, but she was stuffed with wet coin the whole time.”
The small Victorian-era church they want to buy is located near Crannock, a fictional former coal mining town similar to Cessnock in New South Wales’ Hunter Valley. Nick is keen to transform the former house of God into a “heavenly house.” Zoe is less enthusiastic about the “glorious barn” with its beautiful but problematic stained glass windows.
The events of the novel take place in two parts. The first part, “Windows,” covers the recent past. Zoe and Nick have two adult sons – Dominic, a “bright boy” who has become addicted to heroin, and Lachie, a teacher. The pivotal moment in this section is Nick’s sudden death. We do not know at this moment how he died. We know he was treating Sophie, a suicidal 28-year-old woman who made Zoe “sick in the pit of her stomach.”
Sophie came regularly to their house. When Zoe finds her in their bedroom, “a low wail emanating from her open mouth,” she tells Nick to “deal with it!” He did so, and Zoe was startled by the familiar way he manhandled the girl. “She should have known then.”
The second part, “Transformation,” is set in the present. Zoe buys the church, lives in it, and plans to transform the title and exorcise the ghosts – Nick and others – from her past. Readers of Lohry’s previous novel, the maze, which won the 2021 Miles Franklin Literary Award, will see similarities. A woman with children moves to a small community and lives alone while trying to recover from emotional trauma.
Lohrey is interested in how we occupy and change the domestic spaces in which we live, and how collectively domestic spaces, our communities, occupy and change the natural world. As Zoe walked around the church, she thought, “And maybe they didn’t feel like they were always an outsider, always distorting something from its natural form.” It is a reflection that touches on the transformation of the landscape, from coal mining to pastoralism to vineyards, and the colonial war on the local indigenous people.
Lohri brings wisdom and humor to the page. The clip in which Zoe surfs websites about successful church conversions could be a satirical episode of the TV series Grand designs: “The cross would have been easy to remove but the rich shape of the windows was something else.” She reads about replacing altars with marital beds, and laughs out loud in appreciation of the woman who “turned a huge Catholic confessional into a walk-in closet.” There is also dry humor in the juxtaposition of biblical references and the Australian landscape: the first thing the couple sees when approaching the church, Nick’s potential paradise, is a snake in the grass.
the transfer It is a beautifully written, quietly profound novel that explores the purgatory of the past and present as its characters move and reflect on structural and personal transformation. Zoe is at an emotional crossroads, or perhaps the road to Damascus.
While talking to her friend, she berates herself for looking “just like Nick.” “At that moment she could hear his voice, so deep and resonant, so clear, so close to her ear, as if a solid object, long tied to her chest, was unfastened, and she was drifting adrift in a wave of abject longing.”
At a dinner party hosted by a local woman, I spoke to a man who fished. He talks about the joy of being in the “fighting chair” with a blue marlin and shows her a phone video of one on the bait. As Zoe watches “the big fish jump out of the waves, like an acrobat,” the man’s wife adds: “You don’t eat them. Very fun. They throw them back.”
Zoe returns home, goes to bed, and as she drifts off to sleep, “the image of a great marlin rises in her mind, writhing on the ropes, launching a spear into the air and fighting for its life with no sign that it will soon be released.” As I said, Lohri makes writing look easy—but of course, that is an illusion created by a lot of hard-working intelligence. This is her gift that she shares with her readers.
Text Publishing, 240 pages, $32.99
This article was first published in the print edition of Saturday paper on December 9, 2023 as the “Conversion”.
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