I was somewhat confused after finishing this novel. I was expecting there to be a look at the issue of migration, not feeling 'at home' (what is home in the first place?), the alienation that accompanies a move to another country, culture, with the expectation that things would be the same but dealing with the reality that often they are not, with a look at the awful expression of 'roots' – as if people are trees.
There was a bit of that but I didn't feel the issues were explored in the way that it became meaningful.
Charlotte doesn't want to become a 'Ten Pound Pom' and head off to the other side of the world to make a new life in Australia but we don't know exactly why. The closest explanation I could find was that she liked to experience the cold of winter in the Cambridgeshire Fens. That may be the case but it's a flimsy reason, especially when she lives with her husband and very young daughter in a hell hole of a (tiny) cottage, which makes then all ill, and when there's another child on the way. (But, then, weren't all houses cold in the early 1960s in Britain?)
Henry is of mixed Indian and British heritage. He encounters racism (to his surprise) when he eventually goes to the college where he is to teach but I don't see how he was surprised. Surely he would have encountered those racist attitudes on the long journey out on the boat? Those who left Britain in the 1950s and 60s weren't necessarily the most progressive of the British working class, especially demonstrated in their defence of the racist regimes of (Southern) Rhodesia and South Africa a generation later. Even, to this day, Australia is far from being an all-inclusive society.
And Henry's return to India is an extremely unsatisfying episode and doesn't make sense.
If the issues of homesickness and racism aren't dealt with adequately neither is the other issue that seems to be the most important condition that effects Charlotte, her attitude to moving to Australia and the relationship she has with her husband and all those around her – that being she is a terrible mother.
Bishop obviously considers this pivotal as she bookends her novel with this matter but that doesn't mean it's adequately explored in the body of the novel. When only with one child she does what she wants, even at the expense of the health of the little girl. Now this can possibly be put down to post natal depression but that term isn't even hinted at – did the term even exist in the mid 1960s? Later on she just wanders off in her own dreamlike world, leaving her two little girls in dangerous circumstances and doesn't even seem to realise what she has done. At times she shows affection, but even in those circumstances I thought her cold and distant. And the time she totally loses it with her eldest daughter would have her arrested nowadays.
And let's not mention the dreams. Do people actually remember, in such detail, dreams that are so complicated and which presage the future?
I really found this such a disturbing read on so many levels.