摘要：After a seemingly slow beginning, and some awkwardly expressed phrases such as ‘A child sounded a squeal’ (4) and ‘With a trampoline heart she saw the Bridge to her left’(1), Gail Jones’s fifth novel, Five Bells, proves to be a poetic masterpiece, rich with background stories and examining a single event from multiple perspectives. Although the trampoline metaphor conveys its meaning well enough, it appears too early, before the reader has found bearings in the narrative and thus it interrupts the flow. Similarly, to say that the child ‘sounded a squeal’ rather than simply ‘the child squealed’ or ‘she heard a child squeal’, puts an awkward distance in the early pages, which creates a gap between the character in question and the world that they move in. It is only later that we see the novel is showing us observations of shared events through the eyes and consciousness of multiple characters.
