Sorry is Gail Jones's most important and accessible book to date. Perdita is born late in life to immigrant parents Nicholas and Stella. They have come from England so Nicholas can study anthropology. In Broome they keep a ramshackle house with books stacked like furniture. The mother, Stella, obsessively recites Shakespeare, attempting to inject drama into her existence. Perdita is not often shown affection, and only feels at home in the arms of the Aboriginal tribeswomen whom Nicholas studies nearby.
A saviour comes in the form of Mary, an Aboriginal slavegirl and victim of the stolen generation. She becomes Mary's ‘sister' and, along with the deaf and dumb Billy, they become their own tribe.
Jones's female characters often take the place of the ‘other', subverting the usual role of the group of characters around the protagonist. In Dreams of Speaking Alice was confronted by the horrors of Hiroshima, after meeting a first-hand witness in Mr Sakamoto. She was the displaced figure, small and insignificant, in London, and later in Japan, swarming with electronic reminders of progress and digital transcendence. In Sixty Lights , Lucy is ahead of her time in Bombay and London; eccentrically fascinated with photography, new technologies capturing time. She is the ‘other', displaced by her advanced cultural sensibilities.
The Aboriginal characters in Sorry are depicted with elegance and beauty—they are magicians, heroes and saviours. They are mysterious, warm and communal. Jones does not ‘otherise' them except through the eyes of Nicholas and his anthropological study. With his Victorian and social Darwinist background he sees them as ‘base, unintelligent and equivalent to children' (7). The majority of the novel is seen through Perdita's eyes in both first and third person, and she witnesses the Aboriginal people's intelligence and intuition. Mary shows Perdita and Billy how to track, how to search for food, and look for patterns and shapes which are pathways to tucker: ‘all that had been inscribed there before them, in a hidden language never noticed, became suddenly visible' (54). There is more meaning to be found there than in all the wordy babblings of her mother. And when Perdita begins to stutter after a traumatic incident, the significance of communicating without conventional language is again emphasised. Jones does present the possibility of balance though, because Mary enjoys reading, just as Perdita enjoys the hands-on learning. Perdita half-conquers her stutter when a doctor encourages her to speak sentences in Shakespearean rhythms. But she is only completely freed of her stutter when she utters a repressed truth. Jones may be suggesting that the cure is communication, whether this be through the language we know, or less conventional modes, like the sign language that Mary and Perdita learn to converse in with Billy. This is emphasised in the book's opening lines: ‘This is a story that can only be told in a whisper' (3). This line is reminiscent of the closing passage in Toni Morrison's Beloved , which was a story that revealed gaps in the history of black feminine experience in America. It is an ironic statement that says that currently there is not enough representation of the voices in the novel.
There are monstrous forms of white oppression depicted, such as Nicholas's sexual abuse of Mary, and the background of World War Two looming down on the small, but disjointed unit in the hut. But the faces of white oppression are still humanised. Nicholas is described like this: ‘At this moment he seemed most human, and almost vulnerable: he was asking his young daughter to confirm his ideas' (72). This is, however, after his advocation of an individualist culture; the idea that the Aboriginal collectivism is wrong because ‘they were always poor and could never accumulate property' (71). Around this everywhere we have the depictions of war—the international fruits of warring ideals on individualism and collectivism. Perdita startlingly realises the contradictions of war while playing cards one evening:
At once she knew with startling clarity, like a punch in the ribs, one of the terrible, unassimilable anomalies of this world: that there is always war somewhere and peace somewhere else, that there are people dying and at the same time there are people playing cards, sipping, as they do, from cups of sweetened tea, preoccupied only by the pleasures and vexations of a cardboard figure. (82)
On top of this, Perdita feels she has a war going on inside, being alienated from affection by her parents. This parallels her empathy for Mary and the stolen generation experience, a shared representation of abandonment.
Unlike the horrific (yet truthful) implications in Kate Grenville's The Secret River , Jones attempts to bring the reader close to the Aboriginal experience. In Mary, Perdita sees a saint. In an inversion of white cultural values, Perdita actually wishes to be Mary's true sister: ‘She wanted so much to be dark. When she placed her forearm alongside Mary's she saw herself the bright negative of a surer presence. Mary teased and humoured her' (73). The problem is that Mary ends up taking Perdita's place, in a blind justice system that will willingly take her. But Mary is blasé about her fate; she is dignified and accepting. And for this Perdita feels both guilt and awe. Perhaps Jones is suggesting that while many of us do feel guilt, certain problems have gone on for so long that many are subdued into acceptance, black and white, and this creates serious manifestations on the surface of our society. It fosters cycles of stereotyping and unlearning. Jones insists that the (white) reader trial different ways of learning and communicating with those who are the true and original owners of this land. The white reader is, or was, the ‘other', the invaders. Perdita also fails, significantly, to say that precious word ‘sorry', which is now so loaded in Australian culture. In this one overt moment Jones is reminding us how such a small word seems so difficult for some: how a country is blind and deaf, and power is dumb.
One last thing to note about Gail Jones is her absorbingly elegant prose. Sorry is not as lushly descriptive as Sixty Lights or Dreams of Speaking , but it is as fluent. Where the last two novels were beautifully and blindingly lit with luminous and technological references, Sorry diffuses these overt visuals into insights of character—the luminescence of the spirit, and the technological progress of society (often strangely backward). There are a few classic Jones moments, as in this description of pearl shells:
The mother-of-pearl particularly attracted her. It had a beauty she mostly associated with light: the lustre of moon-lit clouds, beam-shot from below, the strange coiny iridescence on the bellies of fish, the glittery traces threaded in the border of her mother's Spanish shawl. (130)
Another is the scene where Perdita first goes to the cinema: ‘Perdita watched a spectral mist waver and disperse, then experienced mobility, with supernatural powers, as she moved with dream slipperiness up a winding road' (177). Jones's intuitive expressions are what ultimately make all her novels worth reading.
The literary mode of communication can be a powerful one, as Perdita discovers in her reading:
There are always moments, reading a novel, in which one recognises oneself, or comes across a described detail especially and personally redolent; might there be in this covert world, yet another zone of connection? (145)
Jones has suggested more than one mode of connection and, in her novel, has allowed readers to see themselves not just in orthodox ways, but in those characters normally typicalised as ‘other'. Her many layers of meaning are easily and enjoyably absorbed through her delicious and elegant writing. Sorry is a story that should be spoken about in more than a whisper.
Angela Meyer is a writer, student of film and literature, and a bookseller at Dymocks Coffs Harbour.