Vested Interests

On a January morning in Perth, a woman is recovered from the Swan River. She was the university's chief archivist — precise, stubborn, entirely without sentiment about what an archive was for. She knew where every document was. There is a note at her house. A single page. Handwritten. It says: I cannot undo what was done. It doesn't say what was done or what gets buried, and what survives the burying, and what it costs the people who decide that something buried should stay that way. It is a novel about a memory and its discontents, about the difference between the record that an institution keeps for its own comfort and the record that tells the truth about what actually happened. About what an institution owes the people whose history it has swallowed. It is a novel about a letter, which was written in 1914 and never answered, and about what it means to answer it a hundred and eight years late, in a boardroom, with the people who were waiting. It is a novel about a woman who spent forty-one years making sure things were named, who understood in the end that she could not hold the record herself but could lay a direction and trust it to be followed.