A novel finished, thoughts undone

I finished reading Come Inside a few days ago and I'm still processing it, struggling with it. Not in a bad way. It has been a long time since I read something that affected me that way. There are not many books that I've read in my life that I re-read to satisfy the urge to try and work out 'what happened' even though not much will be changed. This will be one.

It not a novel to read literally. It is read more on a sensory level (or that is the way I experienced it). This is clear from the structure when the reader opens it - the shifts of point of view and combination of bits. The only other novel I have read with a similar structure is Tim O'Brien's In the Lake of the Woods. O'Brien's novel is made up of fragments, also including (what look like authentic) primary sources, eyewitness accounts, different points of view and bits of narrative from various sources.

I didn't engage with O'Brien's characters in the way that I came to care very much about the women in Come Inside. I'm still trying to connect with them a bit more - the old thing of trying to make everything into a story.

The sense of place and time - particularly the Shipwreck Coast of Victoria in the 19th century - is pervasive. And the finer details of the voyeuristic ways that the locals responded to what was washed up on the shore is dealt with here in a way that is neglected in mainstream historical accounts.

The novel gives a real sense of the sensation that shipwrecks, such as the Loch Ard, caused in local communities. Then, as now, the best and worst of human nature was on show, although it is ironic that it took a work of fiction to show this with such authenticity.

Reading the novel also gave me the urge to re-read Jack Loney's book on the disaster or Don Charlwood's engaging stories of the Shipwreck Coast. Both are mentioned in a bibliography at the back of the novel.