The novel is also punctuated by trees – every episode has its different tree: beautiful, ugly, rooted or uprooted – and by dogs.
An early one comes when, having got to know Laura, we see her unexpectedly through her father's eyes, revealing his great regret that she has inherited his features and is ugly.
De Kretser is a master storyteller and again and again prepares small – and large – shocks that explode tens of pages later, and cannot be given away. It is hard for a reviewer to describe because it seems to proceed with an uncanny lightness, in glimpses and sudden shifts. It is a story without a plot but with changing locations in both history and geography. The story proceeds in a series of episodes – Laura's 1980s, Ravi's 1980s, over the years to Laura in 2004, Ravi in 2004. We read in one and a half pages about Ravi, standing beside a decaying Edwardian sideboard on the back veranda, the day his father dies. Ravi's opens with his family history dating back to the day when Captain Cook died in Kealakekua Bay in 1779, and "an Italian apothecary arrived in Galle on a ship registered in Rotterdam to the Dutch East India Company". She has a recurring dream of "silky blue all around her, pale blue overhead she glided through silence blotched with gold". Laura's story opens with her twin brothers deciding to drown her in a swimming pool. It has two main characters separated by time and space – Laura, born in Australia in the 1960s, and Ravi, born in Sri Lanka, first seen as a child in the 1970s. Questions of Travel is about uprootedness and travel, about tourism and flight from terror, about the trivial and the terrible. The first sometimes feels pedestrian and problematic the second is a serious achievement, yet perhaps impossible without our slow journey through the first.Not to have seen the trees along this road This lengthy novel is sliced into almost symmetrical halves, which differ noticeably in quality. Ravi, one of two protagonists, bookmarks poignantly abandoned websites and ends up asking himself, ‘what if you preferred to scroll down a continuous story’ rather than lead a life that jumps through a series of hyperlinks? Questions of Travel has an essayistic subplot that is as much to do with technology as with travel – cataloguing the subtle notches made in our mental lives between the 1980s and early 2000s: the suspense of the email inbox, the first photos taken on mobiles, the new ‘lightness’ of web-surfing. In 1903, the German essayist Georg Simmel wrote in ‘The Metropolis and Mental Life’ about the loneliness of city people ‘swallowed up in the social-technological mechanism’, and growing more anxious and calculating because of technology (in Simmel’s day, the ‘diffusion of pocket watches’).
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