Oscar and Lucinda by Peter Carey
Gives unique attention to visual particulars. His narrative visualises because its leading characters propose b assess through their eyes. What is described is what matters to them. Even costume is character, not period redden. Lucinda dons grey silk bloomers to proclaim her feminist sympathies; Oscar's SW compadre Wardley-Fish is a trainee clergyman aspiring to roguishness in "a piercing hound's-tooth jacket with a handkerchief like a fistful of daffodils rammed into a rumpled vase". When the story describes how Miriam Chadwick's "lovely peach silk dress" is dyed dusky, falling "like a rose, a 'Prince's Pride', into a copper of Indian ink", it is to mark the bitterly disappointed hopes of the wearer. Just out of mourning for her old boy, she has come to Australia for a new life with a case of "scandalously bright" clothes, only to show her mother's drowning when their ship is wrecked as they arrive. Now it is back to mourning, as the miss who employs her as a governess pushes the glowing frock into the dye: "the dress sucked in the wicked and first it ran in blurry lines along the fine pleats and then it spread, a rush of dark, a blanket of black".
