Strolling around Sydney and Berlin: The materiality of space and the immateriality of time in Gail Jones’s Five Bells and A Guide to Berlin

In an interview, Australian novelist, essayist and academic Gail Jones claimed an interest in psycho-geography, i.e. “in the idea,” as she puts it, “that we must walk around our own place with an active intelligence and with a degree of radical attention to what is there.” Taking Sydney as an example, Jones insists on the importance of looking at the city’s “shapes, its motions,” of attending to its “sounds, corridors between spaces, the unexpected.” It is, she continues, “about apprehending things through shapes and signs.”
Sydney, to Jones, is a place haunted by its colonial inheritance, and Australia, more generally, is a “colony of trauma”, a place where “there is always a tension between remembering and forgetting.” First published in 2011, her novel Five Bells takes place on a single Saturday in January in cosmopolitan Sydney and draws together four characters with their different national backgrounds, haunting histories and memories, all converging on Circular Quay, an Aboriginal site also marked as the place where Captain Cook first set foot. Thus in Five Bells, time and space are merged, or to put it as Jones does, “within the material spaces of a city are these immaterial traces of something else.”
By the same token, Jones distinguishes between a vertical and a horizontal history: on the one hand, she explains, “there is the history that seems to be unfolding and moving forward,” while on the other hand there is a “plunging down into the interiority of the place, into its lost history.” This merging together of time and space, of history and geography also finds an echo in A Guide to Berlin, Jones’s latest novel, published in 2015. Following in Vladimir Nobokov’s footsteps on both, a textual and metatextual level, this novel narrates the coming together of six foreigners, gradually entangling their thoughts, their memories, their pasts, presents and futures in haunted and snowy Berlin.
Focusing on both, the materiality and immateriality of Sydney and Berlin in Five Bells and A Guide to Berlin, my paper will seek to investigate how Jones draws on the trope of temporal and spatial inheritance in both novels to offer ethical understanding within and between re-imagined trans-historical communities.

Works Cited:

“Five Bells with Novelist Gail Jones.” 9 Dec. 2012. Interview by Eleanor Wachtel. Writers and Company. CBC Radio. Web. 9 Apr. 2015. <http://www.cbc.ca/player/Radio/Writers+and+Company/2012/ID/2313221830/>.
Jones, Gail. 2012. Five Bells. London: Vintage.
Jones, Gail. 2015. A Guide to Berlin. Sydney: Vintage.