FICTION Cherrywood Jock Serong Fourth Estate, $34.99 Sometimes an epigraph tells you exactly what to expect in a book, and how to expect it. Cherrywood has a doozy, taken from Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities : “Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears.
” Such is the curious admixture of Jock Serong’s new novel, a fiction about cities both stable and shifting, filled with figures drowning in love and overwhelmed with sorrow, moving to and fro across the 20th century. Jock Serong doles out his revelations at a careful speed in his latest novel, Cherrywood. Credit: Nicole Cleary It’s 1916, the birth of a new era, and in that dazzling invention, the motor car, the young Thomas Wrenfether is thrown from a crash that claims the lives of his parents.
The inheritor of a great fortune, Wrenfether finds success and a happy marriage until both are placed under strain through a proposal made by his colleague and fellow board member, Ximenon. With 300 tonnes of high-quality cherry wood obtained somewhat mysteriously from the Caucasus, Ximenon proposes the construction of a paddle steamer in a land still open to investment and construction, a city comically distant and unimaginable to the Edinburgh-based businessmen: Melbourne. It’s 1993, and on her way to a dinner party, a young, ambitious and temporarily forgetful Melbourne lawyer named Martha asks her taxi driver to pull over so she might quickly jump out and get a bottle of wine from a pub’s bottle shop.
Pausing.