The river of life

Adrian is a professor at a top Australian university and his specialty is death. He lectures on it, writes books on it. Both his parents died when he was a child, one by suicide, but those are long-forgotten events that have nothing to do with his life’s work.

A pretty strong level of denial is going on here, you might think. It is what lies beneath denial that is Andrea Goldsmith’s theme. She takes the title of her novel from a Matthew Arnold poem of the same name that explores fundamental thoughts and emotions that we keep hidden away from others and from ourselves. Apt in the repressed world of nineteenth-century England – and, it would seem, no less apt in the post-Freudian, comparatively liberated world of twenty-first-century Australia.