Australian writer Delia Falconer's first novel is full of vapors and pretense. The story, set in the Blue Mountains outside Sydney during the first decades of this century, is about the unfulfilled romance between its narrator, an orphaned pharmacist's assistant named Eureka Jones, and Harry Kitchings, a landscape photographer who specializes in view books of mountains. Harry is particularly enthralled with their cloud formations and skilled at rendering them. From 1905, when Harry first arrives in the resort town of Katoomba, until 1915, when he announces his marriage to another woman, Eureka nurses a passion for him that she imagines is returned. Yet she cannot seem to breach Harry's armor of passivity.
Years pass without their so much as exchanging a kiss.
Their most intimate moment occurs in 1910, when they are developing photographs together in Harry's cramped darkroom, and their hips accidentally touch. After his marriage, she seeks oblivion in narcotics that she filches from the pharmacy where she works until she takes a job as a nurse's assistant in a sanatorium for consumptives in nearby Wentworth Falls in 1918. Here at last she yields her virginity to an eager tubercular lover, a gardener named Les Curtain. Spiritualism, strange ailments and even stranger cures, and the photographic and printing technologies of the era are depicted in an embroidered and elliptic prose. Eureka says in one of her many mystifying confessions.