“She was too young to be thoughtful, or interested in someone else’s problems. She felt a huge impatience at this unwarranted check to her self-absorption and happy conceit and ambition. So they had all had more troubles than she. Did that really make hem superior? ….It was not as though she were a trashy or frivolous person. Or not only trashy and frivolous. She was almost sure her heart was in the right place. It was simply that circumstances had not called on her to produce it very often.”

In Certain Circles is the fifth and final full-length novel by Australian author, Elizabeth Harrower, and is set in post-WW2 Sydney. Meet the Howard siblings, offspring of well-to-do parents living on Sydney’s exclusive north shore: seventeen-year-old Zoe, a shallow, self-centred, snobbish girl whose sheltered upbringing means she is quite naïve in some respects; and her older brother Russell, returned safely from the war and very unlike the rest of the family. Russell, about to marry childhood sweetheart, Lily, introduces two orphans to the family: Stephen Quayle, a prickly salesman with erratic moods, and his younger sister, Anna.

The narrative, carried mainly by two voices, Anna and Zoe, follows the lives of these five characters over the next twenty-three years. Zoe is a quite unappealing main character, although she improves with maturity; Anna is more likeable; the remaining characters are lightly sketched: Russell is apparently charismatic and convincing, a champion of the needy; Stephen, a stereotypical damaged soul; and Lily, a woman devoted to her twin daughters. A somewhat disjointed narrative may confuse the reader at times. Harrower subjects her players to unrequited love, widowhood, neurosis, mental breakdown, mental cruelty and suicidal thoughts.

Some of the prose is quite beautiful: “Something in him took her from the pink marshmallow castle of her life to a high cliff over the ocean of the real world” and “As always now, she had the sensation, when their eyes met, of sustaining a physical injury. A speechless, difficult resentment went out from them both” and “To live without the interest or attention of other people, without making an impression: in her mind, Zoe groped to imagine such a state. All she could find was a feeling of irritation” are examples.

The dialogue seems rather stiff and formal, but perhaps the well-to-do intelligentsia really did talk like that in post-war Sydney; perhaps they really did spend their days analysing themselves and their relationships. : “Now she realised that she had shared the common illusion that if someone were only ‘himself’, instead of an imitation of what he could be, he would be fulfilled, more likeable, cleverer, happier, good, better, best. That the mask might sometimes be superior to what lay beneath was an idea that had only recently occurred to her”. This previously unpublished novel from an acclaimed author rewards the reader who persists with a very clever twist at the end.