Maya de Jong is an 18-year-old country girl who moves to Melbourne to start her adult life. She lands a job and soon starts an affair with her boss.
This is not the stuff of a first love. His wife is dying and he is troubled. From the moment Maya takes a step toward him, she is aware of crossing a line. She feels cut off from her former life by the big city and cut off from family back home because, "he was everywhere and everything and he was secret."
When her parents, Toni and Jacob, come to Melbourne to visit, Maya is gone. She is not a missing person, as she left a good-bye message and has called her brother, but they know her behaviour is odd. With nothing to do but wait in the unfamiliar city, they embark on a forced reflection.
Though it sounds like the plot of a dark mystery or a cryptic crime novel, The Good Parents is a slower book about the restlessness of waiting. Answers start to unravel quietly and elegantly through the characters thoughts and memories.
Author Joan London shows how moving to a new place turns a person into a stranger and an outsider. This strangeness can change many things, including the relationship with those you have left behind.
London's prose is straightforward and purposeful, which allows space for her sharp observations. She is especially good on how the generations affect each other.
Family history, in London's world, does not repeat itself. Instead, it creates a pattern. What you have been taught in childhood always comes back.
Toni, with her thoughts on Maya, is forced to confront a lost relationship with her own mother. She remembers their occasional lunches, where her mother expressed the sadness of losing touch with a daughter: "I keep thinking I see you."
Faced with the prospect of loosing Maya, Toni finds herself in a similar state of mind as she retraces her daughter's steps through Melbourne in a bid to find out what happened.
London tells the story through multiple perspectives. As the parents' lives provide the clues to Maya's disappearance, each different perspective puts a new piece of the puzzle into place. Jacob, Maya's father, sees himself as an ex-hippie in a conservative place ("the great wave of his times had swept him up and dumped him in a country town"), whereas Maya's roommate in Melbourne thinks Jacob and Toni look like "good country people come to the city."
Similarly, when Jacob saw the town of Warton, where he later raises his family, it looked like "a good scene for an outback thriller," but to his widely travelled sister Warton is a place that has stores as big as barns with empty shelves that "reminded her of Prague in ninety-one." No person or place is quite as they first appear. London expertly weaves these strands of plot and perspective to keep the reader guessing until the very end.
London's debut novel, Gilgamesh, was short-listed for the Orange Prize and the Dublin Impac, and she is a two-time winner of Australia's prestigious The Age Book of the Year Award.
The Good Parents was recently nominated for the 2009 Commonwealth Writers' Prize and is another achievement to add to her growing list. Elegantly written and richly layered, it is a thoughtful page-turner that will appeal to those who want to understand how the motivations of the characters move the plot.
Ultimately, this is a book about the impossibility of leaving a family behind. You carry the imprint of your family wherever you go. To find their daughter, Toni and Jacob must contend with a part of their lives they thought was finished long before.
Claire Cameron is the author The Line Painter and is currently working on a new novel about an airport. Her website is http://www.claire-cameron.com .
