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AbstractHistoryArchive Description
'On a radiant day in Sydney, four adults converge on Circular Quay, site of the iconic Opera House and the Sydney Harbour Bridge. Crowds of tourists mix with the locals, enjoying the glorious surroundings and the play of light on water.
'But each of the four carries a complicated history from elsewhere; each is haunted by past intimacies, secrets and guilt: Ellie is preoccupied by her sexual experiences as a girl, James by a tragedy for which he feels responsible, Catherine by the loss of her beloved brother in Dublin and Pei Xing by her imprisonment during China's Cultural Revolution.
'Told over the course of a single Saturday, Five Bells describes four lives which chime and resonate, sharing mysterious patterns and symbols. But it is a fifth person, a child, whose presence at the Quay haunts the day and who will overshadow everything that unfolds. By night-time, when Sydney is drenched in a rainstorm, each life has been transformed.' (From the publisher's website.)
Reading Australia
This work has Reading Australia teaching resources.
Unit Suitable For
AC: Year 11 (English Unit 2)
Themes
death, forgive, grief, loss, memory, perspective, place, the search for connection, time, trauma
General Capabilities
Critical and creative thinking, Ethical understanding, Intercultural understanding, Literacy
Cross-curriculum Priorities
Asia and Australia's engagement with Asia
Notes
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Epigraph:
Memory believes before knowing remembers - William Falkner, Light in August
Where have you gone? The tide is over you,
The turn of midnight water's over you,
As Time is over you, and mystery,
And memory, the flood that does not flow.
-Kenneth Slessor, 'Five Bells'
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'The first debt of this project is to Kenneth Slessor's elegiac poem, Five Bells (1939), which returned to me, like a remembered song, one midnight on a ferry in the centre of Circular Quay'. (Author's acknowledgements: p.217)
Affiliation Notes
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Associated with the AustLit subset Australian Literary Responses to 'Asia' as the work contains a Chinese character.
Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of
Other Formats
- Also sound recording.
Works about this Work
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Narrative Empathy in Contemporary Australian Multiperspectival Novels : Cognitive Readings of Christos Tsiolkas’s The Slap and Gail Jones’s Five Bells
2021
single work
criticism
— Appears in: The Rise of the Australian Neurohumanities : Conversations Between Neurocognitive Research and Australian Literature 2021;'In this chapter, I approach contemporary Australian multiperspectival novels, i.e. texts in which the reader accesses the storyworld through different focalisers, from the perspective of narrative empathy. I argue that narrative empathy as a result of a text’s multiperspectivity can arise primarily if the narrative foregrounds conflict between focalisers. To illustrate this, I offer readings of Christos Tsiolkas’s The Slap (2008) and Gail Jones’s Five Bells (2011). Narrative empathy features differently in the two novels. While The Slap indeed invites readers to feel empathy on the basis of the multiperspectival structure of the text, this is not the case in Five Bells, since the narrative does not exacerbate conflict in the same way as Tsiolkas’s narrative does. At the same time, I suggest that it fulfils similar functions in both texts in that its main aim is to foster greater understanding for those whose subjectivities are marginalised within society.'
Source: Abstract.
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The New Historical Novel : Putting Mid-twentieth-century Australia into Perspective
2018
single work
criticism
— Appears in: Commonwealth : Essays and Studies , Autumn vol. 41 no. 1 2018; (p. 7-18)'This article argues that, since 2004 or so, a new kind of Australian historical novel has emerged among practitioners of literary fiction, one concerned with the mid-twentieth century. This new historical fiction has been characterized by an aesthetic stringency and self-consciousness. Though Steven Carroll and Ashley Hay will be the principal twenty-first-century writers examined, reference will also be made to several other writers including Carrie Tiffany, Charlotte Wood, Sofie Laguna, and to the later work of Peter Carey. In all these contemporary books, technology plays a major role in defining the twentieth century as seen historically.' (Publication abstract)
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Paratactic Stammers : Temporality in the Novels of Gail Jones
2016
single work
essay
— Appears in: JASAL , vol. 16 no. 1 2016;'Norman Saadi Nikro’s essay, ‘Paractatic Stammers: Temporality in the Novels of Gail Jones,’ sets out to explore how Jones’ ‘sense of fascination and wonder with the technology and culture of modernism informs the phenomenology and tenor of her novelistic style, especially the characters that emerge through the wave lengths of this style.’ Addressing himself to Jones’ literary fiction published to date, Nikro seeks to ‘track the duration in her novels whereby memory, history and story are experienced by her characters as something like intersections, intervals nor spacings, taut and tense folds or pleats in which time is riven by “a strange accession to memory and speech,” as the character Perdita comes to learn in Jones’s Sorry (202).’ Drawing in part on the work of Mikhail Bakhtin and on Gilles Deleuze’s ‘engagement with the work of Bergson,’ Nikro examines in Jones the ‘relational contiguity of parts whose variable movements and orientations to one another bring about a transfiguration of their subjective capacities (as in Perdita’s realisation of her stuttering as a relational dynamic).’ ‘Paractatic Stammers: Temporality in the Novels of Gail Jones,’ offers a rich and original reading of Jones’ fiction, both sympathetic and critically rigorous. Echoing Jones’ own views on modernity, Nikro traces in her novels a poetics of modernity that inflects both the writing and the thematics of the work. ‘Jones’s prose style,’ he suggests, ‘what she calls “a kind of prose poetics’” (Royo Grasa 1), calls attention to the gaps and intervals by which the temporality of narration is not only possible, but rendered a vacant site for the stammer of an interruptive image or voice encompassing an alternative engagement of time and its graphic imprints.’ Like Kirkpatrick, Nikro too highlights the forceful way in which an Australian author develops a distinct narrative voice, in the case of Jones one informed by a constant intertwining of local and global aesthetic and political sensibilities.' (Editor's introduction)
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The Synchronous City : Aural Geographies in Gail Jones's Five Bells
2014
single work
criticism
— Appears in: New Scholar , vol. 3 no. 2 2014; 'A key 'road ahead' in Australian literature resides in the prominence of spatial narratives that interrogate the manifold ways in which heterogeneous cultural identities and histories converge on common terrain. This essay considers Gail Jones's fifth novel Five Bells (2011) as an 'acoustical novel' in which embodied experiences of sound catalyse a spectral form of remembering that unsettles the boundaries of self and cultural identity. In particular, I identify three operative models of sound in the novel; sound as revenant, listening as vital to the appropriation and production of space, and aural modes of trauma recall, arguing that each develops the ongoing concerns of Jones's fiction in new ways. From registering synchronicities in traumatic events which permeate geographical borders in a globalised world to reinstating the body-in-space within a zone of potential encounters, the embodied response to sound emerges as pivotal to the 'spatial practice' of the novel concerned with the potential for imaginative labour to more actively implicate the subject within the spaces of everyday life. ' (Publication abstract) -
No More Boomerang? 'Nigger's Leap' and 'Five Bells'
2013
single work
criticism
— Appears in: Journal of Australian Studies , 1 March vol. 37 no. 1 2013; (p. 48-61) 'This essay argues that Judith Wright's poem "Nigger's Leap" is a reply to Kenneth Slessor's "Five Bells", within the context of discussions about Slessor's and Wright's attitudes towards colonialism and colonial history. The essay also discusses Gail Jones' novel Five Bells and its engagement with Slessor's poem, arguing that metaphors of sound and musical repetition offer a useful way of understanding the structure of Jones' novel and the relationship between novel and poem.' (Author's abstract)
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Hot off the Presses
2010
single work
review
— Appears in: The Weekend Australian , 4-5 December 2010; (p. 22-23)
— Review of Five Bells 2011 single work novel ; The Best Australian Essays 2010 2010 anthology essay ; The Body in the Clouds 2010 single work novel ; The Philanthropist 2010 single work novel ; The Best Australian Poems 2010 2010 anthology poetry ; The Best Australian Stories 2010 2010 anthology short story extract ; The Rest on the Flight : Selected Poems 2010 selected work poetry -
Her Time
2011
single work
review
— Appears in: The Weekend Australian , 29-30 January 2011; (p. 18-19)
— Review of Five Bells 2011 single work novel -
Taut but Expansive Tale
2011
single work
review
— Appears in: The Canberra Times , 29 January 2011; (p. 22)
— Review of Five Bells 2011 single work novel -
Peace Befalls Clamour as Strange Stories Ring True
2011
single work
review
— Appears in: The Age , 29 January 2011; (p. 21)
— Review of Five Bells 2011 single work novel -
Cover Notes
2011
single work
review
— Appears in: The Sunday Age , 6 February 2011; (p. 21)
— Review of Five Bells 2011 single work novel ; The Shelly Beach Writers' Group 2011 single work novel -
Undercover
2010
single work
column
— Appears in: The Sydney Morning Herald , 23-24 October 2010; (p. 35) A column canvassing current literary news including a report on a talk given by Gail Jones on her 2011 novel Five Bells. Susan Wyndham also notes the the published remarks of Man Booker judge Francis Wilson on the final voting for the 2010 prize winner. -
A Pair of Ragged Claws
2011
single work
column
— Appears in: The Weekend Australian , 22-23 January 2011; (p. 19) A column canvassing current literary news. Discusses Five Bells by Gail Jones and the Faber Academy six month creative writing course to be conducted by Allen and Unwin in Sydney, commencing in March 2011. -
Quay to It All
2011
single work
column
— Appears in: The Canberra Times , 29 January 2011; (p. 21) -
The Ring of Time
2011
single work
biography
— Appears in: The Saturday Age , 5 February 2011; (p. 28-20) The Sydney Morning Herald , 5-6 February 2011; (p. 30-31) -
Sounds of the City
David Gaunt
(interviewer),
2010
single work
interview
— Appears in: Bookseller + Publisher Magazine , Summer 2010-2011 vol. 90 no. 5 2010; (p. 43)
Awards
- 2013 longlisted International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award
- 2012 winner New South Wales Premier's Literary Awards — People's Choice Award
- 2012 shortlisted New South Wales Premier's Literary Awards — Christina Stead Prize for Fiction
- 2012 winner Kibble Literary Awards — Nita Kibble Literary Award
- 2012 longlisted Miles Franklin Literary Award
- Circular Quay, Sydney Harbour, Sydney, New South Wales,