In Questions of Travel, Michelle de Kretser’s globe-trotting protagonist, Laura Fraser, stuffs her backpack with literature, boards a flight and later muses over “the feeble wattage she encountered everywhere [that] was opposed to books”.

Recently, I lugged de Kretser’s large, hardback version of this outstanding novel through Europe and the UK for five weeks and can confirm that it was well worth the regular eyestrain brought about by dimly-lit hotel rooms.

What a book! It gave me goose bumps.

I don’t normally gush but I’m happy to do so in response to a book of such fine calibre and originality. I’m also seriously glad it’s been shortlisted for a number of significant literary awards — including the 2013 Miles Franklin — and that others are singing its praises.

Internationally renowned novelist and literary critic A S Byatt, for example, wrote in The Guardian in April that Questions of Travel was unlike any other novel she had ever read. It was deep, beautifully crafted and had an extraordinary ending, she said. “It persists in the mind long after the last page.”

I agree with Byatt that the book’s ending is pitch perfect — a testament to de Kretser’s skill in building character and scenes so cunningly that you almost never focus on where the book’s going; its final destination obscured by a plethora of fascinating but credible staging posts.

Wherever de Kretser lures her readers — through five decades and to destinations like Bali, India, London, Prague, Naples and back to Sydney, where we find Laura in the arms of a married man and where we see her choose (out of kindness) to vamp an elderly Italian — we’re enticed by fine writing to want to find out how her two major characters are affected by the differing locales they must negotiate.

Twin protagonists

Like all of us, Laura sees the places she visits through her own filters. Primarily these relate to being born in Australia and into a fairly well-to-do family with a mother who died early, a father with who never really bonds with her and a well-travelled aunt generous enough to leave her niece a tidy travel fund.

The book’s other protagonist is Ravi Mendise. Ravi has some serious baggage when he lands in Australia as an asylum seeker — the result of terrible violence involving his family in Sri Lanka.

Amid the horror, however, there are joys for the reader in meeting Ravi and his extended family. Sri Lankan-born de Kretser fleshes these people out tenderly with tales of how they live together with prickly acceptance and miss one another terribly when the family is split.

Ravi was an early explorer of the World Wide Web and quick to see its potential as a distraction for people from “the petty humiliations of making do”.

“Soon everyone will be a tourist,” he said.

In the ’90s, Ravi’s friend Nimal gets involved in producing a website called RealLanka, which attempts to show people the true destination of Sri Lanka rather than the mythical paradise the majority of tourists get sold and swallow in blissful ignorance.

Inevitably, the venture fails.

Ravi can eventually see why: “He realised that seeing how local people lived was a myth that lurked like a piece of garden statuary, vaguely ennobling, in the tangle of motives that led to travel. No one on holiday really wanted anything of the kind: ordinary life was what they were on holiday from.”

In Sydney, working as an aged care assistant, and after breaking a long internet fast, Ravi dwells on the World Wide Web’s growth since his early days of exploring it.

“The web had grown from usefulness into beauty. It was as complex and various as a world. What was in Ravi’s mind was the waterfront at Circular Quay, its kaleidoscopic gathering of shipping, idlers, commerce, performers, its dazzling mutations and flow. The web was like that, a city of strangers and connections: people were drawn to it from far and wide.”

Tourist in his own town

During the years it takes for his case for asylum to be heard, Ravi is housed in a Sydney sleep-out by a kind woman called Hazel.

Getting work as an IT specialist and making a few friends increases his fondness for Australia, but he still seems a fish out of water. Ravi is lonely.

Eventually, with the civil war cooling in his country of birth, he is forced to face the question: Does he want to feel like a tourist, forever, in the country in which he resides?

Laura was a young, less-than-stellar art student when she started travelling in the 1980s. After several decades living overseas, she returns to Sydney.

She starts work for a travel guide publisher but tourism’s gloss is definitely wearing off.

Laura realises that any glamour and enjoyment associated with world travel declines rapidly when she has deadlines to meet — and when there is little time to truly relax and rub up against local idiosyncrasies, flavours and people.

Laura and Ravi become colleagues and it is clear that (without love?) both feel somewhat displaced and that neither of them has put down sustainable roots in Australian soil.

It is also clear that publishing guidebooks does not add up to creating meaning but does help those involved to pretend they are contributing to “global harmony, international understanding”.

Jacaranda haunting

One delight for me involved seeing Sydney through Laura and Ravi’s eyes. Both describe the city and its people with perceptiveness, humour, irony, admiration and occasional reverence.

Laura reflects nostalgically on what she calls “a jacaranda haunting” that went on for weeks — and I’d hazard a guess that most Sydneysiders would know what she’s talking about. “They [the trees] went unnoticed from one spring to the next, and then they were all-at-once: not a blossoming but an apparition. They purpled valleys, filled the funnel-shaped space between roofs, transfigured suburban hills. In rainlight, their lilac was also blue. It was the colour of nostalgia itself: elusive yet unmistakable, recollection and promise. Nostalgia floated jacarandas over London traffic, above the aisles in Sainsbury’s …”

In London she encounters the “filtered residue of dreams”— Sydney’s “sandstone walls, beach towels drying over balconies, the small mean kind of cockroach, bus drivers in shorts … Strap hanging in the Tube, Laura swayed: she was standing on the deck of a boat, adjusting her stance to the wash from the Heads.”

Ravi swoons during the gaudy suburban Christmas light pilgrimage he takes part in and which could well be modelled on the longstanding and popular neighbourhood light shows I drive past every Christmas. His description of this quintessentially Aussie moment is priceless.

Tour guide par excellence

De Kretser tackles some important “questions of travel” more obliquely than Helen Simpson did in her excellent 2011 short story collection In-Flight Entertainment. Several of Simpson’s stories hit out hard at travel’s impact on global climate change.

De Kretser may seem to move more slant-wise into strong issues but certainly does not avoid them. Some broached include terrorism’s effects on individuals and nations, Australia’s often negative attitude to refugees and whether travel is actually a good thing. Regarding the latter, she places Ravi in his childhood in a town with child sex predators and she has Laura come to the realisation that “travel is just one more thing many people in the world cannot afford”.

Journeying with de Kretser through this marvellous book, the reader is in dextrous hands. These are the hands of a “tour guide” par excellence whose descriptions can be so gobsmackingly brilliant and characters so strangely moving that you feel you’ve stumbled on a word-palace Alhambra or a metaphorical Taj Mahal.

I hope hordes of travellers and homebodies choose this soon as their next literary flight into awe. Travellers should not be put off by the book’s heft. Nor should they leave home without a high-wattage portable lamp in their suitcase to ensure they will definitely see and savour every last word.

Questions of Travel
Michelle de Kretser
Allen & Unwin, October 2012, $39.99