Questions of Travel by Michelle de Kretser

JUDGES' COMMENTS

De Kretser’s fourth novel shows her talent at its peak in an expansive dual narrative that spans continents and decades. Alternating chapters follow the development of two characters - Laura, a plain and unloved Australian woman who aimlessly travels the world in an effort to find herself, and Ravi, an earnest, gentle Sri Lankan IT worker who is forced to flee for Australia after his wife and child are killed in political violence. Their lives intersect briefly but fatefully in Sydney, where both work for a travel guide publisher.

The grand scale of de Kretser’s themes - forms of travel, work, communication, love and loneliness - is matched by her exquisite mastery of language, imagery and detail. Almost every sentence has an original insight that invites us to look afresh at familiar places and ideas. There is nothing heavy-handed or predictable about the treatment of underlying contemporary issues such as immigration and yet they give the novel a satisfying philosophical weight and political urgency.

The quality of the prose in all dimensions, together with the resonance and power of its story, lifted Questions of Travel above the other titles on the shortlist. This novel is most certainly a sophisticated accomplishment in literature. But the author’s language serves purposes beyond those of literary artifice or artefact, speaking to us in ways that resonate locally and globally. In a world of shifting populations, vulnerable human beings continue to negotiate departures from old and dangerous worlds, or merely too familiar or unsatisfying origins, and with less than complete knowledge or understanding steer towards imagined destinations. Among much else, Michelle de Kretser’s novel weighs the personal cost of the search for any new and further identity, as much as it points to the random outcomes that may lie at journey’s end. In its smallness and largeness, in the particulars and the generalities of a story of human movement across time and space, Questions of Travel gives very modern voice to a tale both ancient and epic.