66 pages • 2 hours read
Kate MortonHomecoming
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2023A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Finding Home and Belonging
Content Warning: This section of the guide discusses the source text’s treatment of death by suicide.
The very title of Morton’s novel, Homecoming, presents the concept of home as a central preoccupation for several characters. Although the title ostensibly refers to Jess’s return to Australia, it also concerns her inner journey toward a new understanding of what truly constitutes a home. Polly, her mother, also struggles to find belonging and a sense of home, and in the end, they find a homecoming of sorts by reconnecting with each other.
When the novel begins, Jess lives in London, far from Australia. Early in her time there, she stumbles upon the Charles Dickens Museum, and it becomes a touchstone for her “whenever [she feels] angry or sad or even just inexplicably unsettled” (30). For Jess, her loneliness is alleviated by reconnecting to Dickens, and therefore her childhood home, reminiscing about “[a] thousand childhood hours spent lying in her grandmother’s garden in Sydney, book in hand” (31). Literature therefore assuages her loneliness; however, this connection is more fragile than she realizes. When she finds out about Nora’s hospitalization and makes plans to return to Australia, her sense of London as home quickly shifts. As the narrative states, “Now she felt like a fraud, an imposter, going through the motions of a beautiful life that had once seemed strong and substantial, but had been revealed as tissue-paper thin” (48). Thus, Jess is once again left feeling isolated and alone as she realizes that the sense of belonging and connection that she felt through literature wasn’t true belonging. Instead, it was only a temporary balm for her deeper sense of loneliness.
After arriving in Australia, Jess experiences an immediate familiarity that she identifies as belonging, and she believes that she has come home. However, even as she returns to Darling House and sleeps in her own bed, that sense of belonging is elusive. This issue is highlighted when the narrative relates the frantic nature of her inner thought “I want to go home” and emphasizes that “the thought came to her in a flash […] It wasn’t that she wanted to go anywhere; rather, she wanted to feel at home, settled” (147). In London, she can blame this feeling on being an expatriate, but in Australia, the question becomes more complicated. As she soon realizes, “When someone said, ‘I want to go home,’ what they really meant was that they didn’t want to feel lonely anymore” (543). Even upon returning to Australia and Darling House, Jess still hasn’t managed to assuage that persistent loneliness, but she has begun to search for the root of it, and she soon discovers that claiming a home is far more complicated than finding a physical place to belong.
This loneliness persists until she and Polly reconnect much later in the novel. Unlike Jess, Polly was always uncomfortable in her mother’s home, which was dominated by Nora’s overbearing personality and hidden motives. When Polly moves to Brisbane, she is free of her mother’s domineering ways, but she still feels lonely, and is unable to make Brisbane her home. She, too, is forced to reconsider the definition of a home and explore the true causes of loneliness. She realizes that “being lonely wasn’t the same things as being alone […] loneliness was different. One could be lonely in a crowded room” (372). Polly has come to understand what Jess herself realizes: that home and belonging are not connected to a physical location, nor to the number of people in her life. Home is about connection and belonging; However, even knowing this, Polly still struggles to banish that persistent loneliness. At the end of the novel, Jess and Polly find home, true belonging, and a balm for their loneliness with each other. In the closing paragraphs of the novel, Jess “[feels] a sensation in her chest that was quite the opposite of loneliness” (544) for the first time, during her trip to Tambilla with Polly. The two women find their way out of loneliness and embrace a new sense of connection to each other.
Transforming History into Myth
In Homecoming, Kate Morton unveils two generations of history by delving into the secrets of the Turner family and the town of Tambilla. Her narrative highlights the process by which a personal history transforms into a story that eventually takes on the elevated status of a myth, its original details long since obscured beneath false assumptions and deliberate mischaracterizations. Morton achieves this effect by using an embedded narrative to place the Turner Tragedy alongside other seemingly inexplicable tragedies that have become legends. This narrative fluidity is further enhanced by her talent for juxtaposing this human history with the much longer timeline of the wild Australian landscape. As Jess observes toward the end of the novel, “There was a truth observed by all good preachers, leaders, and salesmen: tell a good story, tell it in simple language, tell it often. That’s how beliefs and memories were formed” (535). Over the 60 years between the Turner Tragedy and Jess’s discovery of the true murderer, the accepted narrative has been that Isabel murdered her children and died by suicide. The novel traces the tragedy’s movement from a deeply personal history to the realm of a larger Australian myth. Through time and multiple retellings, the more fanciful version of that myth becomes accepted fact. Although Daniel Miller approaches his book, As If They Were Asleep, with truth and integrity in mind, his widespread and erroneous publication of the theory of Isabel’s guilt helps to solidify that theory into accepted truth that soon becomes legend.
Even as the stories in Miller’s book are deeply personal, they become one of a number of similar stories told over time about crimes that are both inexplicable and shocking. Such crimes tend to linger in the public memory long after the drive to find the real truth has died away. As Jess notes, the Turner Tragedy was eventually included in “lists of other cases whose notoriety had earned them capital letter status—the Somerton Body, the Pajama Girl, the Beaumont Children” (167). By placing the Turner Tragedy alongside these other crimes, Morton emphasizes the incident’s transformation from personal history to cultural myth, for the Turner Tragedy becomes another crime that has instant name recognition. In addition, Morton strengthens this association by using actual unsolved crimes in Australia to emphasize the fact that such puzzling crimes often gain a greater significance beyond the events themselves and take on the status of a myth that captures the public’s imagination.
Another way in which Morton elevates the Turner Tragedy to legendary status is by placing it in the context of the larger, more ancient Australian landscape. As the narrative slips back and forth between 1959 and 2018, the landscape remains the same. The mountain range that Percy claims as “his compass” has a more ancient history, as well as being the subject of a much older myth from the Kuarna, an Aboriginal people who were almost entirely destroyed during the early years of colonial settlement in Australia. Yet Morton takes the timeline back even further when Isabel notes, “In Australia, the strangeness came from the land itself. Its mystery and meaning existed outside language—or outside her own language, at any rate. It told its story in far more ancient ways and only to those who knew how to hear it” (175). The landscape surrounding Tambilla is a constant feature of the narrative, and by placing the Turner Tragedy in this much larger context, Morton removes the personal elements of the story, pushing its movement into myth. By establishing the myth of the Turner Tragedy through Daniel Miller’s novel and tying it to actual unsolved Australian mysteries, Morton establishes that the mythology of the Turner Tragedy parallels the real mythologies of recent and ancient Australian history.
Connection Through Literature
Throughout the novel, several characters escape loneliness through literature, finding both escape and connection in the pages of books. Jess, Percy, Polly, and Isabel are all literature lovers, and each of them is suffering from a near-incurable loneliness. They find escape and adventure in books, along with deeper connection with other literature lovers. Jess is a reader, and she alleviates her loneliness by reconnecting to the books that fascinated her in the past. When she moves to London, it is through literature that she first connects with the city, and it is no accident that the place she feels most at home is the Charles Dickens Museum. This love of literature begins early in her life with her discovery of David Copperfield, and later, when she goes to Halcyon for the first time, she finds new connections through literature when she uses Miller’s book to reconnect with her family’s past. As the narrative states, “Daniel Miller had taken her to Halcyon in 1959, and thus she already knew it” (541). For Jess, literature’s power to connect alleviates her loneliness in a new place even as it creates recognition of places she has never seen before.
Percy Summers, Polly’s biological father, is another literature lover in the novel. While bedridden with polio at age 12, Percy discovers literature as a means of escaping his illness. He finds a surprising universality in the Victorian novels which “seemed at first to describe a world quite unlike his own, […] but the more he read, the more he came to recognize the people of his town in Austen’s characters” (11). Percy finds both escape and connection in literature and even at a young age, he appreciates the universality of both literature and the human condition. This love of literature stays with him for the rest of his life, and his love affair with Isabel begins with a shared love of literature. After Isabel’s death, he remembers her waiting for him next to “a small pile of books” (530). Books thus feature prominently in his memory of Isabel because of their centrality in the relationship, for literature was one of the ways in which they truly connected.
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