Homecoming

“A thousand childhood hours spent lying in her grandmother’s garden in Sydney, book in hand, had come back in an instant, and she’d hurried up the concrete stairs and pushed open the shiny black door. Time had dissolved; the novelty of being in England, of finding that the names and places she’d come across in novels were real, was still fresh, and Jess had been utterly awed to think that Dickens himself had once walked through these halls, eaten at this table, stored his wine in the cellar downstairs.”

After moving to England, Jess discovers the Charles Dickens Museum and becomes a frequent visitor. Through her childhood connection with Dickens, she forges a tenuous connection to her new home in order to assuage her loneliness. The themes of Finding Home and Belonging and creating Connection Through Literature are both present in this passage, for Jess connects to her new home through literature when she finds herself unable to create living human connections to her new place of residence.

“Tonight […] the beauty of the wonky houses and ivy-clad bricks, the lanterns on the cottages of the well-heeled, the hint of warm domesticity glowing yellow from behind the curtains, was acute. It pressed upon her sharply from all sides, and where once she had felt part of it, now she felt as if she were outside, an observer looking in.”

In the wake of the news of Nora’s hospitalization, Jess experiences a fundamental shift in perspective. Suddenly, her Australian upbringing, of which Nora was foundational part, tugs her back to Australia. In this moment, London once again feels foreign to her. Morton therefore develops the theme of finding home and belonging by emphasizing Jess’s sudden realization that home is more than just a place, and this realization will initiate Jess’s inner journey to discover her own true definition of home.

“Someone I used to know a long time ago told me once that fear is the doorway to opportunity. And I can assure you, my love, that every good thing that’s happened to me since has come through acting despite my fears.”

Nora offers Jess a final bit of advice as she sees her granddaughter off to London, sensing Jess’s moment of uncertainty. This statement will resonate differently as the novel continues, for it reveals the reasoning behind the murkier choices that Nora has made. One way in which Nora acts on this premise is when she buries her own deceased infant daughter and secretly claims Thea as her own. Another example occurs when she manipulates her family in order to keep Jess away from Polly. This is the only place in the text where Nora’s true feelings about her actions are revealed. In this quote, she admits to acting despite her fears in such pivotal moments.

“Jess found it impossibly sad that someone with as much to give as Nora should find herself with so few doting family members. Many times, she’d wondered how her own mother could have been so selfish as to abandon Nora—and Jess, too, for that matter, when she was ten years old.”

As the novel continues, Jess will discover just how much Nora has lost, for on the day of the Turner Tragedy, Nora lost Isabel and her children, as well as her own baby. However, Jess will also begin to understand the ways in which Nora caused Jess’s estranged relationship with Polly. Nora manipulated both Polly and Jess, inserting herself between them and taking over Jess’s upbringing. At this point in the novel, however, Jess still idealizes her grandmother and accepts her version of the story as the unvarnished truth.

“It had taken Jess some years to realized that her grandmother’s use of the term ‘The Family’ denoted a schism in time. The Family had lived Before, the stories about them were historical, even those in which Nora herself featured. These were tales viewed through a lens of loss; Nora was the last surviving member of this large, robust clan.”

Once again, Nora has shaped Jess’s understanding of her family history. Ever since she was young, Jess has known about this “schism,” the “Before” and after, but she’s never truly understood the hidden forces that created the schism in the first place. This is one of the motives for Jess’s investigation—to uncover this family that Nora has separated her from and incorporate it into her own and Polly’s personal histories.

“Polly had a sound. It came from the necklace she always wore: a long silver chain, from which she’d hung two pendants—one fine and shaped like a jacaranda tree, the other a sterling silver cat. The jacaranda tree had been a gift, and the cat had come from a secondhand shop; it had once been the top of a baby’s rattle, Polly said, back in the olden days, a ‘hey diddle diddle’ cat with a ball inside that made a soft tinkle whenever she walked. Jess loved that sound. It always made her feel safe and warm and happy.”

Each piece of Polly’s necklace holds meaning for her that Jess isn’t aware of—the jacaranda from her lost love and the piece of the baby rattle, which symbolizes Nora’s infantilizing treatment of Polly and Polly’s own loss of Jess. For Jess, Polly’s necklace is also deeply meaningful, for it evokes some of the few happy memories that she has of her mother.

“My grandmother was a girl when they planted those trees. None of the adults there that day lived to see them grow to full height. People were wiser back then, and less selfish. They understood that they were part of a line, not the beginning, middle, and end of it.”

In this passage, Percy is remembering his mother’s observations about the oak trees lining the main street of Tambilla. This sense of families that exist on a continuum is a thread in the Turner family story, and it drives the future of the Summers family as well. Percy inherits his parents’ grocery store simply because they expect him to carry on with the family business. In this passage, Morton approaches the theme of transforming history into myth from a fresh angle, for she links the personal history of one character to a longer line of family history.

“As she sat in silence, Jess kept circling back to her grandmother’s secrecy. Nora was never one to shy away from past sorrow. She’d been forthcoming on subjects like her failed marriage, the loneliness she’d suffered as a child, a number of professional setbacks. She knew that history was cumulative. That the past was not something to be escaped from, but a fundamental part of who one was.”

As Jess visits Nora in the hospital, she reflects on her discoveries about her family and about Nora herself. One of Jess’s arcs of development concerns the dual theme of maturation and disillusionment, for as she realizes that her worldview has been largely shaped by Nora’s stories and perceptions, she is forced to reevaluate her understanding of her own family history. In moments like this, she begins to step away from her childhood perspective and embrace a more mature perspective that recognizes Nora’s limits and flaws. As the truth is revealed, Jess is struck by the contrast between Nora’s mandate of honesty and the deep secrets she keeps about the past.

“Thereafter, the Turner Tragedy seemed to have been largely forgotten, mentioned only occasionally in lists of other cases whose notoriety had earned them capital letter status—the Somerton Body, the Pajama Girl, the Beaumont Children.”

Although the events at Halcyon represent a deeply personal history to Nora, Polly, and Jess, the outside world comes to view it as just another piece of true crime mythology, the mystique of which fades further with each passing year. Each of the other crimes mentioned in this passage are actual unsolved Australian crimes that have gained the status of dark myths within the nation’s collective consciousness. By placing the Turner Tragedy alongside these real-life mysteries, Morton applies their authority and their enigma to the fictional crime in her novel.

“This was not an entirely unfamiliar sensation. It was, Jess suspected, the common preserve of all true readers. This was the magic of books, the curious alchemy that allowed a human mind to turn black ink on white pages into a whole other world.”

Jess is scrolling through online photos of Adelaide Hills, which includes Tambilla and Halcyon. She experiences a strange sense of familiarity that she attributes to Miller’s book, which evoked the landscape and the environment so clearly. Here, Morton illustrates the theme of connection through literature by demonstrating how profoundly a fictional story can inspire the imagination. The familiarity that Jess feels is an echo of what she felt upon arriving in London after reading about the city through the works of Dickens and other famous authors.

“But while any journalist might aspire to do the same, Miller had taken it a step further, crossing the line from observer into animator when he entered their heads, described their imagined thoughts, turned them from subjects into characters. No doubt this was what had made the book so much more compelling than a straight reportage might have been.”

As a journalist, Jess has a unique perspective on Daniel Miller’s work because she understands the journalistic process and the ethical demands of the profession. She also recognizes that Miller’s use of fiction-writing techniques in a nonfiction piece is a specific choice that he made to enhance the dramatic effect of his book. Elsewhere, she identifies Miller’s work as an example of New Journalism, a school of writing that blurs the boundaries between fiction and nonfiction by using fictional techniques to intrigue readers. Thus, this aspect of the novel illustrates the theme of connection through literature.

“The netsuke in question had been Mrs. Turner’s favorite. Although not as elaborate as the others, there was something beautiful about the white rabbit. Human beings are drawn to symmetry, and the small figure crouched on all four haunches was a deeply satisfying creation.”

Isabel Turner’s netsuke collection, which she inherited from her mother, is so valuable that many people doubt the fact that she gave the rabbit netsuke to Becky, as the girl claimed. If the story is true, then the police interpret Isabel’s choice to give away her prized possessions as a warning sign of someone who is considering dying by suicide. The rabbit netsuke is especially significant because in Japan, the rabbit symbolizes luck, prosperity, and fertility. In this passage, however, Morton emphasizes both the beauty and simplicity of the netsuke, both of which are qualities that Isabel sees in Becky.

“Birds flew overhead. Lizards armed themselves on the hot rocks nearby. Snakes moved in the long-dry grass of the paddock beyond. All around, the noises of Australian summer intensified to form a deeply soporific afternoon soundtrack of crickets purring, leaves whispering, bird chittering in the tops of giant gums. The birds knew, even if most human beings were yet to notice, that there had been a change in the atmosphere around Tambilla that afternoon. Clouds were gathering in the distance, the wind had shifted, a storm was coming.”

In this passage, Nora is reflecting on the lingering questions about the afternoon that Isabel and her children died, and she is also reconsidering the crime scene. She places the scene in the larger context of the natural landscape, representing the family as just another part of the natural environment. This passage therefore stands as an illustration of the process of Transforming History into Myth. Morton illustrates the passage of time as the bodies remain undiscovered, and the storm she describes is designed to foreshadow the metaphorical storm that will be unleashed in the human world once the bodies are discovered.

“He called it a nonfiction novel. He believed that the tools used by novelists should be available to journalists, too. […] His aim was to capture the truth, to tell the story, but he didn’t much care if he was one hundred percent accurate as to whether a bird flew overhead at a particular point in time. […] The fact that Mrs. Turner had observed her son John to become ‘effervescent’ when he was excited was more important to him than whether she reflected on it at the precise moment he records her having such a thought in his book, if you know what I mean.”

Nancy is explaining Miller’s attitude toward his own book, which Jess is struggling to define. In Nancy’s description, she recognizes some of the theory behind New Journalism, in which the writer strives for essential truth over factual accuracy, as when he represents Isabel’s observation of John, but not necessarily at the particular time she said it. This strategy creates a more personal sense of the people involved and illustrates Morton’s theme of connection through literature.

“A shiver passed through her body. It was the strangest sensation: when she was a child, they’d have said someone was walking over her grave. Now, though, she recognized it as an instinctive sense that something momentous had just happened. Or was about to. Without another moment’s hesitation, Jess opened Miller’s notes, oblivious to the fact that deep inside Nora’s beloved house, the phone was ringing yet again.”

In this passage, Jess has just received the transcript of Miller’s interviews with Nora. As a journalist, she understands the wealth of information and insight that the transcript represents, and this moment marks her determination to solve the mystery behind the Turner Tragedy even as she strives to gain further insight into Nora, whom she had always thought she’d understood.

“‘You’re sensitive,’ her mother used to say whenever Polly called out in the night or cried for fear of the dark or froze on the first day of a new school year. ‘It’s not your fault, just something in the way you were built.’”

Although Polly is experiencing normal childhood fears, Nora’s own anxieties blow Polly’s reactions out of proportion and create drama where there is none. Instead of admitting her own fears, she projects her anxiety onto Polly, creating an identity for her daughter as sensitive and fragile. This identity will persist in Jess’s mind and even in Polly’s own mind, and the depths of Nora’s manipulation will only be understood later in the novel, when the story of how Nora came to be Polly’s mother is fully revealed.

“The contrast between the formal garden and the native bushland was electric. It took Nora’s breath away to stand on the corner of the verandah as the setting sun darkened the clipped hedges to a lush deep green while simultaneously bleaching the trunks of the candlebarks on the ridge beyond. The friction between the two was what Thomas craved. To possess an estate of unequaled civilization and comfort but know that it stood on the precipice of danger: therein lay the charge.”

Nora recalls the first time she visited Halcyon; while she was initially upset by Thomas’s decision to move his family so far away from her, she understands why he was drawn to the property. The Australian landscape is a recurring feature in the narrative, often taking on the status of a character in its own right. Morton uses the juxtaposition between the events at Halcyon and the ancient landscape of Australia to highlight the Turner Tragedy’s place in a much longer continuum of human and natural history, thereby emphasizing the theme of transforming history into myth.

“He couldn’t comprehend how a mother could even consider doing such a thing, killing children she’d brought into the world. When he told Annie about the day’s hearing over dinner that night, he’d expected her to be outraged, but she’d surprised him. She’d seemed to understand, even sympathize. ‘The poor woman didn’t want to leave her children behind,’ Annie said, her choice of words a disturbingly close echo of the Kilburn woman’s police interview. ‘She couldn’t face going on, but she didn’t want to leave them without a mother.’”

In the absence of any other theories or evidence, Sergeant Duke concludes that Isabel must have killed her three children and herself. Although he is surprised by his wife’s response, this moment highlights Morton’s exploration of the nature of motherhood throughout the novel. Through the perspectives of various mothers, from Nora and Polly to Meg and Annie, Morton offers several different views of motherhood, boldly addressing truths that those who haven’t experienced motherhood firsthand might not understand.

“And then, finally, it came. The evidence Duke had been hoping for. It didn’t always happen that way, but every so often the right piece of information fell into place like the key to a jigsaw puzzle. This testimony was an account from a source ‘close to the parties,’ whom the police refused to name publicly due to the sensitivity of the subject matter. The witness described having recently had to stop Mrs. Turner from harming her own baby.”

Duke relies on his instincts about the crime, as well as eyewitness testimony, to support his theory that Isabel is the murderer. Under pressure to provide closure to the Tambilla community, Duke uses this bit of information to finalize his theory, not knowing that Nora, the anonymous source, has other motives for her statement. In her own investigation, Jess questions the ethics of relying on secondhand accounts, especially anonymous ones.

“Polly hooked the bag over her seat and put the book on the table beside her place setting. She did know what Jess was like: curious and committed. As a child, nothing had escaped her notice. It had been a challenge and a delight.”

Polly has decided to tell Jess about the Turner Tragedy and give her Miller’s book, not realizing that Jess is already investigating the crime. Polly wants to use the book to reconnect with Jess, developing the theme of connection through literature in the novel. This quote also highlights Polly’s understanding of Jess’s character, revealing that she is more connected to her daughter than Jess understands.

“A Portuguese friend had once given her the word ‘saudade’ when she was trying to describe the feeling of being overcome by a weighty sense of absence for something that couldn’t be had or experienced again; Jess had never forgotten it. That’s how she felt now. She missed the Tambilla of Miller’s book with an intensity that was almost visceral.”

In this passage, Jess and Polly visit Tambilla together in 2018. After Jess’s work on the investigation, involving deep study of Miller’s book, interviews, and notes, her vision of Tambilla is rooted in the past. However, the small, sleepy town of 1959 has been replaced by a bustling tourist destination, and Jess is disappointed by this shift. Her reaction illustrates how strongly literature can bring a time and place alive in a reader’s mind.

“A cruel fact of life, that parents and children shared so many fundamental experiences but only one of the pair retained the memories. It was a lonely position to occupy, the sole rememberer.”

Polly reflects on her memories of quality time with Jess, which happened mainly when her daughter was young, before Polly moved to Brisbane. When Polly is first reunited with Jess, she tries to reconnect with her daughter through these memories but is disappointed to find that Jess doesn’t share them. Polly and Jess both struggle with loneliness throughout the book, and they both seek connection, working toward finding home and belonging. This search will eventually lead them to a new appreciation of each other.

“Polly had not always been the best mother. On one occasion, she had even been a harmful mother. It was Nora who’d stopped her and rescued Jess. For a long time, Polly hadn’t even remembered the incident. That was one of the scariest parts. She’d argued with Nora and insisted it wasn’t true.”

In this quote, Polly is referring to a time when Nora claimed to find her standing over Jess’s crib with a pillow. She and Jess have been told this story many times over the years, and Nora used it as justification for stepping in to become, for all intents and purposes, Jess’s parent. However, as Jess will later discover, Nora has used this story before to influence the case against Isabel. This reveals Nora’s willingness to manipulate people and cause long-lasting trauma to her own daughter and granddaughter in order to keep her secrets and assuage her own anxiety.