The getting of un-wisdom

There is a photograph stuck to the fridge in Michelle de Kretser's kitchen, a sunny domestic scene featuring her partner Chris Andrews and their dog Gus. The demeanour of neither betrays a sense of drama and heart-stopping anxiety, yet the photo was taken soon after the biggest adventure in the hound's life, and sparked the structure, and part of the plot of de Kretser's new novel 'The Lost Dog'.

In 2001 while staying at a bush farm in southern Gippsland, Gus went missing in the forest, leaping after a wallaby and breaking free from his minders. He was gone for several fraught days until, thin and lacerated, he found his seekers.

De Kretser, sitting at her kitchen table and sipping on ginger and cinnamon tea, is at pains to point out that, although the disappearance and hunt for the dog forms part of the narrative, it is only one of many story strands, and the outcome in real life should not be anticipated in the novel.

"Gus was a very lucky dog and details of the story have been changed," she emphasises. Gus died earlier this year, at a ripe age, but the Richmond weatherboard where he lived is still in thrall to dogs, with two black and white mongrels of distinguished demeanour roaming the book-filled rooms.

All three pets were rescue animals and the need to save what others have discarded is a recurring theme in the book. Alongside the exploration of a man's relationship with his dog, a more general animality pervades the novel, from the musky aroma of its main female character, the mysterious artist Nellie Zhang, to the daily confrontation that old and arthritic Iris de Souza has with her own excrement.

It is in part a commentary on the sanitised world in which we live, where the old, the sick and the imperfect are made to feel useless, invisible. "We have an obsession with bodies in the West, but there is a denial of bodily-ness," de Kretser argues, commenting that the obsession with fitness and control of appetites is unsensual.

Our animality is something we have become disgusted by, she says. Perfect teeth, straight strong limbs and glowing skin are the template that separates the Western physical orthodoxy from a more diverse cast in less affluent countries.

Iris, an Anglo-Indian who, with the coming of Indian independence found her sort no longer welcome, has fetched up in a nameless city uncannily like Melbourne. The faded wealth and colonial-hued dreams that fed her youth have been replaced by a dull suburban existence and, as her aged body crumbles, she is forced into increasing dependency on a self-righteous sister-in-law.

Her son Tom, the protagonist of the novel, is an academic, immersed in a world of books and too dependent on the wisdom found among their pages. When he comes into the orbit of Nellie and her fellow artists, who inhabit an old Richmond warehouse studio, his senses cannot decipher the clues that confront him, clues about identity, the past and loss. In order to make sense of the world, he has to understand that not all is explicable, that some things are forever unknowable.

De Kretser describes it as a novel about the getting of "un-wisdom", or a different kind of wisdom. "He needs to unlearn his desire to learn," she says, of a character she later describes as unfixed, Indian and not Indian, Australian and not Australian, "masculine but in some sense quite girly".

Readers of her previous highly acclaimed novels, 'The Rose Grower' and 'The Hamilton Case', will be familiar with the way that de Kretser plays with expectations and the way in which her dry, sometimes black humour dissects the manners and language of her characters.

Whether revolutionary France or colonial Ceylon and post-colonial Sri Lanka, the characters are always impeccably of their time and place. It is something of a surprise to find her latest novel in the orbit of contemporary Melbourne, with its jagged skyline and Skipping Girl Vinegar sign, its narrow alleys, art galleries and universities.

What prompted this move to the here and now after so much there and then? Did she feel it was time to bring in more autobiographical elements? It is a (rather obvious) theory that she briskly deflates. "Every story comes with a setting and a time" she explains, "and this was a compelling story."

There are obvious parallels. Tom arrived from India as a 12-year-old, Michelle de Kretser left her childhood home in Sri Lanka when she was 14.

Academic success saw her move from Melbourne University to the Sorbourne in Paris, before a career with Lonely Planet and the setting up of its French office in the early 1990s. 'The Rose Grower' grew out of a walking tour of Gascony.

'The Hamilton Case' is an exploration of Sri Lanka in the time of her grandparents and parents. She feels both Australian and not Australian but doesn't think about it much.

Having said that, she has not been back to Sri Lanka for 20 years, and her Australian upbringing has marked her as different. She noticed how she moved differently from other Sri Lankan women, how her stride was longer and how she occupied more space. Not that this is a source of angst, far from it.

"One of the good things about being a novelist is that one is allowed the freedom to inhabit many different lives and I think that it's good to have that in reality too, that you can be different people in different places, and have different experiences to draw on."

While travelling frequently - she was recently at the Frankfurt International Book Fair to collect the LiBeratur prize for the German edition of 'The Hamilton Case', one of several she has garnered for her last novel - she spends most of her time in Melbourne and its looming if un-named presence in 'The Lost Dog' gives it a grungy glamour that will please its residents.

At one point in the novel Nellie Zhang asks "doesn't setting out to reject the past guarantee you'll never be free of it? It's like being modern means walking with a built-in limp".

The question revolves around a discussion of Henry James and his fascination with the supernatural and Tom, de Kretser's narrator, is in the final stages of writing a book entitled 'Meddlesome Ghosts: Henry James and the Uncanny'. It is while holed up in the bush, taking a brief break from his project, that the dog goes missing.

'The Lost Dog' is a book about being haunted by what you have lost, what is absent, and when I think of ghost stories and hauntings I think of James. 'The Turn of the Screw' is the definitive ghost story and he also haunts 20th-century fiction."

Coupled with this is the idea of the modern, and many of James' novels juxtapose bright brash American characters with more sophisticated jaded Europeans. At the same time James saw Europe as the home of modern writing as opposed to the more Gothic literary style of his homeland. Australia is a country with a complex response to its European colonial heritage, and an unease about the wild bush that presses in on our cities and reminds us of the aeons before white settlement.

De Kretser's descriptions of the brooding, steep damp forests of south Gippsland emphasise their power to conceal, and to create mystery. It is, looked at with a European sensibility, the Gothic counterpart to the brash young cities of the plains.

De Kretser's haunting looks back from the future as well as from the present. The past is always there in the present, but the present will also some day be the past, and as strange as it once was familiar.

As much as we are caught up in the present of the novel, de Kretser gives us tantalising glimpses of a future in which her characters are no longer the same. And can we trust what they tell us anyway? The unreliable narrator is another Jamesian touch, and also a very de Kretserian one. The Lost Dog is published by Allen & Unwin.