More than his shape, more than his touch, more than his off-hand humour and his inexperienced furvour, she wanted returned to her the ordinary astonishment of that first known body. James’ sorrow mingling with his desire forms the black heart of the story, and Jones handles the co-mingling of nostalgia, desire and the development of mature, independent love perfectly:
The reader feels their ache – the damage in their separate lives, and the desire to go back to something that was powerful for both of them. James and Ellie form the love story of the book, reuniting in Sydney after twenty years apart. Jones’ prose is delicate and richly poetic, always moving behind and beneath the superficial to not only get at the emotions and thought processes of her characters, but also at the memories of the past that illuminate the present. I can’t think of a higher compliment as The Waves is Woolf’s most mature and powerful piece of work, and Jones’ work accomplishes something similar, bringing together the disparate characters into a single multi-faceted character around a single multi-faceted location: “How then does light return to the world after the eclipse of the sun? Miraculously. From the very opening of the book where Ellie, the most well-developed character, imagines the arc of Circular Quay to the circular ending where she is falling asleep imagining the Quay and trying to remember to phone her old lover James, the book reminded me of Virginia Woolf’s The Waves. It’s sails form, to use Jones’ own words, “the intersection of so many currents of information.” There is outward motion as the characters walk, meet, and move in and out of that focal point, but the real plot takes place in the transition that each character undergoes. At the centre of each of the lives we move in and out of, is the Sydney Opera House. From the start of the book and right through it, the reader is thrust into the very heart of four characters in a single location – Circular Quay in Sydney. Like the epic poem from which it takes its title, Gail Jones’ Five Bells is a story about a series of inner illuminations or moments. Five bells, the bumpkin calculus of Time.”
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