When I was a little girl, I was allowed to watch a limited amount of television, and what I loved – yes, you can laugh at me – were the singing cowboys, like Roy Rogers and Gene Autry. We are talking the 60s and I was constrained by what was on at the times I was allowed to watch, but still, I gave my heart and soul to these cool dudes. At least, they were to me. All this is a long way around to say I love that Myfyanwy Jones’ third novel, Cool water, features one of my favourite songs from that era, the titular “Cool water”, but I’ll return to that later.

Cool water is a strong, but thoughtful novel about fathers and sons, about what makes a good man, and, particularly, about family and what we inherit (whether we like it or not). I have read a few novels since blogging that explore manhood and fatherhood, including books by Christos Tsiolkas and Steve Toltz. This is another, and I found it absorbing. Set in tiny Tinaroo in Yidindji Country on the Atherton Tablelands of Queensland, Cool water is structured around two storylines, one, set in contemporary times, and the other set over 1955 and 1956 during the building of Tinaroo dam. Threading through these two time-frames are three men, Frank, his father Joe, and grandfather Victor.

“Life was an extreme sport” (Frank)

The novel opens with a Prologue, featuring Victor, the town butcher, appearing supremely confident at a town event. But immediately there is something a bit askew in the way he is described. Not only is he “imposing”, but he’s “horribly handsome”. We are introduced to many of the characters who will appear in the story to come, but the Prologue closes at “the end of the hall, where fatherly embrace has become stranglehold: Joe, white-faced now, wide-eyed and wheezing, as Victor Herbert uses the crook of his arm to apply an unrelenting pressure …”

From here, we jump to the present and Victor’s grandson Frank. His father, Joe, has died in the last year, and he, his wife Paula and daughter Lily have returned to Tinaroo for Lily’s wedding. But all is not well. Joe casts such a shadow over Frank that his relationship with Paula is suffering. They are drawing apart. The novel is told third person, but in the contemporary story, it is all from Frank’s perspective, whereas in the earlier story we switch between Victor, young Joe, and a woman named Evelyn who, unhappy in her marriage, catches the philandering Victor’s eye. Jones handles the storylines well, but it is Frank’s voice which carries the novel as he struggles to make sense of his complicated father and be the man, husband and father he wants to be:

… he feared all the men in his family were cursed. And that however hard he tried to be good, he would not be able to escape his shadow.

By contrast, Joe is the murkiest character. We see him as a young boy, caught in an adult drama between Victor and Evelyn that he doesn’t understand. A sensitive boy, he has promise as a human being, but is the youngest and least tough of Victor’s three sons and bears more than his share of Victor’s brutality. Unlike Victor and Frank whom we know as adults, we only know adult Joe through Frank’s eyes. This can feel frustrating because a strong sense of intergenerational trauma underpins the novel but the Joe Frank describes doesn’t match the child we’ve met. However, through seeing how his father treated him, and hearing Frank’s (and his sister’s) recollections, we gradually fill in the gaps to see a man who didn’t fully shake his father’s brutal volatility. As the story progresses, we realise that Joe’s dreams of a different life to that mapped out by his butcher father had not been realised. His death seems to Frank, “a measured suicide” through “deliberate self-neglect”. He is the saddest character in the story.

All this is told against the backdrop of the dam and its lake – first the building of the dam, and later as a drought-stricken recreational facility. This three-generation story could have been set anywhere, so why choose this? I had some ideas, but wanted to see if Jones had been interviewed about it, and I found she had, at Good Reading Magazine. Jones says that her novels “always seem to start with place”, and so it was a visit to Tinaroo Dam which inspired this novel. She says that, “in 2017, Tinaroo Dam was at 25 per cent capacity and full of blue-green algae; pieces of the old, submerged town of Kulara had begun to surface – an eerie manifestation of the ever-present past”. 

And there you can see the inspiration. The dam is a powerful place, with a complicated history worth exploring but it also works as a useful metaphor for the “ever-present past” (and thus perfect for Jones’ exploration of intergenerational trauma). Dams and lakes, too, are intrinsically paradoxical, with dam-building representing violence and a desire to control, and lakes offering opportunities for beauty, peace and recreation. Jones uses this to full effect, including well-placed references to colonialism and First Nations dispossession, starting with subtle humour in the Prologue, where we are told that a visiting magician had “come a long way by ship (that said, so had most of the crowd, one way or another). In such ways can writers both truth-tell and decolonise our literature, without telling stories that are not their own.

As for the song, “Cool water”, lines from it appear a few times in the novel, always associated with Victor and always conveying some sense of menace, but also just a little perhaps of a lost soul, a war-damaged man who has lost his way. (In case you are interested, here is the version of “Cool water“, by Frankie Laine, that was popular in 1955 when the novel is set, but there are many versions out there which convey different senses of its meaning.)

Ultimately, Cool water is a hopeful novel, one that recognises and conveys unapologetically the very real damage that can happen in families, but that also sees, as Frank hopes early on, that “a different ending was always possible”. A sensitive novel that leaves much unanswered. I like that.

Myfanwy Jones
Cool water
Sydney: Hachette Australia, 2024
296pp.
ISBN: 9780733650024

(Review copy courtesy Hachette Australia)