Not that West’s novel lacks anything in either suspense or titillation. He offers his readers an intimate view of the habits of European high society in the gilt decade that led to the first world war, and adds a glimpse of solidly teutonic and provincial bourgeois respectability and sensuality in the Swiss household of Dr Carl Jung, pioneer psycho-analyst, who at the time of the novel is trying to resolve his simultaneous infidelity to Freud and to his own wife.

West takes a character mentioned fleetingly in Jung’s notebooks and develops her as a fully-fledged and suicidal member of the haute-monde of early twentieth century Europe. In desperation she comes to Jung for help, and West reconstructs time and characters to enable us to share both the sexual excitements of power and the intellectual excitement and emotional frustration of an aspiring scientist. As a further complication, he adds a possible and problematic murder. Wisely, he does not attempt to resolve the consequent dilemmas within his fictional framework but hands them over to a handy proxy father confessor to settle.

Like West, Ian Moffitt is an accomplished story-teller, but in his case the murder is potential rather than past. The suspense is thus doubled, as the reader has to work out both who is to do it (whowilluvdunnit) and whether he or she will succeed. Without revealing the answer, I can state that the reader will be harrowed in following the narrator to find it.

But Moffitt is not content merely to tell a tale. His novel is also about the break-up of a marriage – although most of the breaking seems to have occurred before either novel or marriage begins – the relationships between generations, and the enigmatic qualities of Manly and the Sydney Harbour. His view of the young is admirably bleak, but he portrays the old with quizzical sympathy. The world he portrays will remain with his readers long after they have forgotten the details of the plot which has kept them reading in the first place.