The Conversion declares itself a real-estate novel from the opening sentence, “when they saw the FOR SALE sign planted in front of a tall hedge”. That Australian obsession with home ownership shapes Amanda Lohrey’s ninth novel, but not always in predictable ways. The home here is a deconsecrated church, which opens a meditation on the material spaces we choose to live in and the way buildings can inhabit our spirits.
A longtime couple Nick, a therapist, and Zoe, a retired solicitor, lose everything in the financial crisis and decide to leave their handsome federation villa in an unnamed city. Nick is keen to break out of their middle-class cocoon and renovate the 1890 sandstone church they find in a rural valley amid coalmines and vineyards. Zoe is dubious about how to adapt the vertical space with its sombre “churchiness”. But after Nick dies suddenly, she takes the project on as a tribute to him and as a retreat from the ghosts that rear up from their marriage.
Those who know Lohrey’s previous novel, the Miles Franklin prize-winning The Labyrinth, will see strong likenesses in The Conversion. Anyone who deeply loved The Labyrinth, as I did, might find the intertwined themes distracting. The narratives unfold as if to the same template. Both follow a lone woman (and mother of sons) seeking respite from emotional trauma in a move to a small community. Both examine her pursuit of psychic healing through making a new home – a beach shack and a labyrinth in Erica’s case; a more literal and stubborn challenge for Zoe. Both cast biblical imagery against Australian landscapes alive with snakes and cockatoos.
If the echoes are seen as deliberate, as they must be, they ultimately enrich both novels. Lohrey has often looked at human nature by turning her intellectual prism on our attraction to old and new ideologies, acknowledging a need for transcendence. Connecting threads run through many of her novels. The Labyrinth and an earlier novella, Vertigo, are set in the same fictional village on the coast – in New South Wales by deduction, though it could be elsewhere in Australia. The Conversion moves inland to a mine- and drought-scarred valley – perhaps the same one Erica traversed to visit her son in prison – where struggling workers live alongside landowners and tree-changers.
The Conversion confronts the place of religion in contemporary life head-on, yet with light detachment. Empty churches are an obvious symbol, which Catholic-raised Lohrey approaches from many, mostly secular directions. Life is free but unstable without rules and rituals, and conversion takes different forms. While the labyrinth that Erica builds gave that novel a fluid movement, The Conversion is contained in the static space of a church building ill-suited to the Australian environment, harder material for inhabitant and author. Zoe’s vertigo is caused by heights and the sins of the church. Even Nick, treating obsessive patients with “the walking therapy”, forced them to walk within the boundaries of a room, aiming “to get them out of the psychic attic room into a larger space … ” According to the theory, “problematical space is either too small and claustrophobic, or too big and amorphous … and it was a question of finding the right boundaries.” This is one of the novel’s intriguing ideas, widely applicable to life.
The novel has two parts, Windows and The Conversion. The first, recollected in past tense, unravels Zoe and Nick’s life together in brief translucent flashbacks. Nick’s damaging behaviour towards his wife, one of his patients and himself is never fully explained but seems to emerge from a restless belief that he can fix every problem. His interest in the psychology of space is laid out in conversations with Neville Glass, an old friend of Zoe’s and a town planner. Zoe’s greatest problem with the church is what to do with the stained-glass windows, which are beautiful but fragile. Until she can work that out she is immobilised by indecision.
Part two, after Nick’s death, propels Zoe forwards in present tense. Her inner life appears in troubling dreams and self-questioning, while daily encounters with local characters bring purpose. A determined drama teacher engages Zoe in her ambitious school production and a hospital job earths her in humanity. Rather than plot, the novel progresses with the quiet tension of a life shaken by crises and epiphanies.
Lohrey continues to write with mature wisdom, dry humour, and sharp detail of person and place. Her strong sentences build a sturdy edifice for reflections on architecture and metaphysics, raising children and small-town relations. But her focus is tightly on her characters, not delving, for example, into First Nations ownership of European-settled land. This is a mind-expanding novel, one that will excite readers who appreciate its moral nuance and lingering implications.
The Conversion by Amanda Lohrey is published by Text Publishing ($32.99) in Australia
