[In the following review, Gerrard focuses on the emotional consequences of knowledge and truth on the narrator of Disobedience, particularly as they affect his relationship with his mother.]

Jane Hamilton is the chronicler of family relationships; the cartographer of the human heart. Everyday catastrophe blows apart the lives of her characters, so that pain, guilt and all the tensions and terrors of intimacy are exposed. In all her books the domestic is turned into the epic. Sorrow is a human condition. Betrayal becomes an earthquake rumbling along the fault lines of love. A depiction of one quiet tragedy becomes the map of the world. Her novels are lush, long-winded, easy to read, intense and brimming with dangerous emotions. They are melancholy blockbusters.

Disobedience tells an old story: the adulterous relationship between a woman and a man. The woman is a musician, a wife and a mother of two: Mrs. Beth Shaw. The man, Richard Poloco, is a violin player who lives in a wooden cabin, wears shabby clothes and is a seductively two-dimensional cliche, like a pen-and-ink drawing of a romantic lover.

The daughter, Elvira, is beautiful and stubborn and strange; all her adolescent passions channelled into Civil War reconstructions. She dreams not of boys but of glorious slaughter. Henry, the quieter oldest child, narrates the story of his mother's long betrayal, looking back in his late twenties, on his 17-year-old self. He discovered his mother's secret, through (a post-modern touch) her emails. He's a computer buff, amiable, shy.

On the brink of troubled adulthood, he discovers his mother isn't just Mrs Shaw. She's someone else as well, someone lyrical, rapturous and besotted: she's Liza38 (the computer name Henry gave her), sneaking off to see her lover each week, deceiving her family.

The affair is imagined by the son, who constructs it from the messages he reads. He evokes for himself his mother naked, his mother joyful. The clothes she wore, the looks she threw, the way she would have smiled, the way she must have felt. The fact that the ostensible subject of the novel—a love affair—becomes refracted in this way does not matter. The real subject of Disobedience is apparently obedient Henry's relationship to his mother. He looks at her, voyeuristic, when she is unaware of his gaze. He tracks her life. He follows clues she doesn't know she is leaving. He torments himself.

The shadow subject of Disobedience is the tricky nature of truth and knowledge. We think we know a person but we know only the face we see. Like Henry's mother, we are the objects of other people's narcissistic inventions.

Hamilton is an emotional, full-throttle writer. Not for her understatement, reticence, simple lucidity. She describes and re-describes events. She seems more interested in emotions than creatures. She loves to dwell on the meaning of betrayal, or grief—on all the psychodramas of the human soul.