A side plot in one of Gail Jones’s most celebrated novels, The Death of Noah Glass (2018), involves a film-loving man who has recently lost his sight. Benjamin is desperate to enjoy thrillers again. He remembers watching, before his vision faded, the silhouette of James Bond, as iconic as a Caravaggio, taking aim down the camera aperture during the opening credits.

But the app Benjamin is using to describe movies is “mechanical and unimaginative”, so he hires former philosophy academic Evie Glass to provide live descriptive audio. She is not the Bond type:

The advertisement asked for a three-hundred-word biography. Nothing more. Evie had composed a florid and somewhat metaphysical note, which ended: ‘curious about the invisible that lies beyond the visible’.

Evie is left to ponder how to transpose Hollywood spectacle into words: “how she would describe bashings and fisticuffs, and police cars hurtling in elastic slow-motion twists as they crashed.”

Review: The Name of the Sister – Gail Jones (Text Publishing)

Jones’s latest novel, The Name of the Sister, has a similarly detached and denatured relationship with thrillers. It begins in classic genre territory: a young woman is found stumbling down an outback road north of Broken Hill, without the power of speech and without an apparent identity. The police begin to suspect that this “Unknown Woman” has escaped from an assailant holding her captive in an abandoned mine.

The scenario recalls the

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