Randolph Stow, one of the most serious and admired of the younger Australian writers …, has himself supplied an epigraph for my review of his novel…. One of his characters is attempting to instruct an Italian gardener from a phrasebook. "When the sun is shining, do not make water on the flowers," she says, "for they will die."

Well, "The Merry-Go-Round in the Sea" is all flowers, all bright images, small blossoms of descriptive writing and of incident. It is like notes for a novel, or perhaps an autobiography. All that is missing is characters and a plot….

It is true that there are people with names who speak dialogue and are caught up in events. It is true that there is a protagonist, Rob, 6 years old in 1941 when the action of the book begins, 14 when it ends….

What the small boy believes against all telling to be a...