The Idea of Perfection

Don't let the ungainly title put you off. This is a sweet, sharp comedy of town and country, love and loneliness, prissiness and the lasting satisfactions of really good design. If you don't believe me, here are the first two sentences: "In his ex-wife's clever decorating magazines, Douglas Cheeseman had seen mattress ticking being amusing. Marjorie had explained that it was amusing to use mattress ticking for curtains the same way it was amusing to use an old treadle Singer as a table for your maidenhair ferns …" What precision. What elegance. What an eye for the vanity of human wishes. Welcome to contemporary Australia, as seen through Kate Grenville's eyes.

Two townies, each of them plain, lonely and hitting late middle age, come to the depressed little bush town of Karakarook, New South Wales. Shy, jug-eared Douglas Cheeseman is an engineer. He has been sent to replace the old wooden bridge with a nice new concrete beam. Spiky, big-boned Harley Savage is a textile artist and heritage consultant (part-time). She has been sent to help local people set up a museum of the old pioneer bits and pieces they find lying around at home. Heritage versus engineering; quaint old bridge versus nice straight new one. It doesn't look as though Douglas and Harley will get on.

Grenville is a poet of the awkward moment. Harley is awkward, Douglas is awkward. Both of them make the locals they meet feel awkward on their behalf, and as for this situation about the bridge … Grenville doesn't use quote marks round dialogue, which heightens the delicious sense of embarrassment and excessiveness. Remarks just slip out, unguarded and unmarked. And she uses bouncy interior-monologue italics to excellent comic effect: "There was no way you could sit somewhere and be watching the world go by. The world simply did not go by in Parnassus Road."

As it advances, the book swells and glows with love for the plain, the down-home and the flawed: the padded coat-hangers and crinoline toilet-roll covers in the Cobwebbe Craft Shoppe; the dog who adopts Harley as his mistress without asking her permission first. "Out here," Harley comes to realise, "people went by different rules. You did not just pick out the best bits of life. You took the whole lot, the good and the bad. You forgave people for being who they were, and you hoped they would be able to forgive you."

The romance between Douglas and Harley is balanced against a funny - if unkind - sub-plot featuring Felicity, the bank manager's silly, somewhat racist wife and her obsession with the local butcher, a muscular young man of Chinese origin. Much fun is had with loins, the word inscrutable, and pointless pampering products of all sorts. Kate Grenville, born in 1950, is one of Australia's leading contemporary authors. The present book is mellower than Lilian's Story (1994) and Dark Places (1997), the works with which she made her reputation, and all the finer an achievement for that.