This is the final novel in Steven Carroll’s series based on T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets. Carroll hadn’t intended to write a quartet but after the publication of the first book, The Lost Life, a chance conversation with critic Geordie Williamson at the Brisbane Writers Festival led him to continue the project.

This fourth volume can easily be read as a standalone. It was written during the Covid lockdown and you can feel it in the book, a sense of being enclosed and then set free. The central character is Eliot’s first wife, the highly strung eccentric, Vivienne Haigh- Wood, whose tumultuous relationship with the dour Eliot is abruptly ended when sheis committed to a London asylum. For years she languishes in the asylum, obsessed by Eliot and his abandonment of her. Eliot never visits, but one of her few visitors, pharmacist Louise Purdon, becomes convinced of Vivienne’s sanity. This is where Carroll departs from real life to create an achingly beautiful work of fiction.

It is the beginning of the Second World War and London is on edge with news of the war being fought on distant battlefields. The Lunacy Law Reform Society exists to help people wrongfully committed to asylums and advocate on their behalf, making use of a law that states that if a person committed escapes and manages to survive on the outside on their wits, they can be declared sane and freed. With the Society’s help, Vivienne is smuggled out of the asylum and taken to a safe house to wait out her 30 days. As she waits, she reflects on her relationship with Eliot and all her flaws, and his. It was a tempestuous marriage, Vivienne passionate and mercurial, Eliot childlike, out of his depth and withdrawn.

Eliot is now an important figure in English society, so it’s an embarrassment to the establishment that Vivienne has escaped, and political pressure is applied to the police to find her. War veteran Detective Sergeant Stephen Minter, the son of Jewish emigres, is tasked with finding Vivienne. It’s not an assignment he wants; he has read Eliot and Eliot’s antisemitism has sat uncomfortably with him. In his search for Vivienne, Minter comes face to face with Eliot, with his brilliance but also his ambition, inhumanity and aloofness. He starts to feel empathy for the abandoned Vivienne and disdain for Eliot and the British establishment.

This book is a tour de force; I was a few chapters in and I felt compelled to email Carroll to tell him what pleasure his book was giving me and what a beacon it was, shining through the Omicron haze. Though he’s a Miles Franklin winner, Carroll has not always received the attention he deserves; I hope he does with this magnificent work.

Mark Rubbo is the managing director of Readings.