By Kerryn Goldsworthy
To the Sea
Christine Dibley
To the Sea, by Christine Dibley.
Macmillan, $32.99
Zoe at 17 is by far the youngest of the Kennett siblings, a late child and a model schoolgirl, beautiful, clever and sporty. But there is something odd about Zoe, and one day she simply disappears from the family's idyllic beach house on an isolated part of the Tasmanian coast. DI Tony Vincent finds himself being drawn in to the old family stories that have led to this moment, stories obscured by Irish mist. He also finds himself becoming obsessed with the absent Zoe. This novel ambitiously combines three incompatible genres: the police-procedural, the family saga, and a kind of Celtic-Australian magic realism. While each works quite well on its own in this book, the intrusion of magical elements into other narrative modes so firmly grounded in reality just doesn't quite work. It's too much to ask of the reader's suspended disbelief.