Fotios Photos/PexelsAngela O’Keeffe’s compelling new novel, Phantom Days, is a haunting contemplation of the power (or, perhaps more precisely, the agency) of stories.Isabel, in her thirties, ends a short romance with Lewis after an act of violence he attempts to obscure. Shortly afterwards, she develops a phantom pregnancy: while her body behaves as though she is pregnant, there is no foetus. Review: Phantom Days – Angela O'Keeffe (University of Queensland Press)The ongoing development of this rare condition, along with a looming tension from Lewis’s refusal to let go of Isabel and his imagining of a potential future child, adds propulsion to this otherwise introspective work. I read it in one sitting, but it hovered in the background of my world for weeks after. Its continued presence reminded me of novelists Sofia Samatar and Kate Zambreno’s phrase “the ambience that is literature”, referring to the way that books – like places – can emanate an atmosphere or vibe. Angela O'Keeffe’s third novel explores the power – and agency – of stories. Sally Flegg/UQP A painting is more than a pictureIt would be difficult to summarise either of O’Keeffe’s previous two novels – Night Blue, largely narrated by Jackson Pollock’s painting Blue Poles, and The Sitter, about a writer struggling to finish a novel about Cezanne’s wife – without talking about visual art. Its presence in Phantom Days is more subtle, nested within layers of other themes: literature and reading, health and recovery, domestic abuse and misogyny, intergenerational trauma and grief, and relations of varying kinds.It is by no means absent, though. At several points, the novel references a series of dark maroon works by abstract artist Mark Rothko. These paintings are kept in a room in Tate Modern, designed under detailed instructions from the late artist, including soft lighting and low ceilings. “‘A painting is not a picture of an experience; it is an experience,’ Rothko had said once,” observes Isabel, who views these works. At several points, the novel references a series of dark maroon works by abstract artist Mark Rothko, like Black on Maroon (1958). Angela Glindemann Here, I thought of philosopher Walter Benjamin’s notion of the aura, which has to do with an artwork’s “presence in time and space” – a set of coordinates that cannot be reproduced and transmitted elsewhere. A commercially published book is a reproduction, but it is also an experience, with the potential to affect us. (This potential could be called an aura, but it’s often known in literary circles as “vibes” – often placed in opposition to “plot” or other forms of narrative action.) And perhaps because it is a mass-produced object, the material nature of a book can be elusive, something of a phantom presence (at least until we get a paper cut, or sore eyes). When we speak of the power of storytelling, this is often evidenced as measurable gains in qualities such as knowledge or empathy. Of course, they matter greatly. But emanating from within this novel is another possibility: the vibrations of the stories we encounter – even if they are just quietly waiting on our own (or someone else’s) to-be-read pile – which are no less material for being ethereal. A book narrated by a bookThe titular “phantom” could refer to this ethereal quality – or most obviously, to Isabel’s medical condition. But as with other aspects of O’Keeffe’s storytelling, there are layers to this word choice that reward lingering attention. There is another phantom, of sorts – a book Isabel left in a taxi shared with Lewis, which then journeys through several apartments.The book is an eerie almost-presence – observing and narrating much of the story (alongside Isabel’s perspective and later, her mother’s). In anthropomorphising a creative work, O’Keeffe revisits a creative choice from her debut. While not unprecedented, even within recent Australian literary fiction, the move has been called “risky”. There are varying schools of thought on nonhuman perspectives in fiction. On one hand, imagining perspectives beyond the human might help us reassess our place in the vast world of things living and non-living; however, we are, of course, unable ever to escape our own subjectivity. There are moments in Phantom Days when this feels close to the surface, as the book’s gaze continues to rest primarily on the humans surrounding it. Interestingly, one of those humans is also an inanimate object: one of the book’s main companions is the ashes of Lewis’s mother, whose story is folded in.A book that holds a lightWhile works that feature anthropomorphised objects have received mixed reviews, Phantom Days succeeds in the subtleties – and restraint – of how this device is used.There is an inherent tension between the book’s point of view and common Western perceptions of agency, as rooted in individual action and limited to humans – or certain other animals. This is echoed in popular Western storytelling structures such as the hero’s journey. Indeed, of the novel’s small cast of characters, the book has the clearest goal, implied from the first line – to be a saviour, specifically of Isabel. In a conventional work, this would set the book up to be a protagonist. However, from its inanimate position, the book cannot easily fulfil this role, as least as a protagonist is commonly understood. Moreover, Isabel has not even read the book – and even the book does not know its own content. These details illuminate a meaningful question about what it is that texts do – which is not limited to what they represent (or reproduce). One thing this book does is transmit light, which flickers between literal and metaphorical as the story progresses. Through this strange atmospheric motif, Phantom Days contemplates resonances and vibrations – considering what moves between things, rather than staying strictly in the realm of those individual things (living, anthropomorphised or otherwise). Indeed, tracing the etymology of the word “phantom” backwards, some roots imply unreality (“apparition” and “image” – reproductions, of a kind), but others, further back still, mean “to bring to light” and “to shine”. So, light is another phantom in this novel: an eerie “weightless presence”, as Isabel puts it. The thread between writer and readerThis made me conscious of the atmospheric conditions in which I had opened my copy of this book. Its lasting aura was not the result of an isolated interaction between me and it, but instead something more diffuse – an ambient effect, like a light. (I think here, too, of how novelist Han Kang wrote of the relation between writer and reader as “a thread that emanates light”.)Light waves move unperceived until they come into contact with a material. This material then seems to alter, as it both receives and transmits light onwards. Like other atmospheric qualities – such as, say, low ceilings – light is a shared part of our context that is nevertheless experienced differently from any given position (spatially, temporally, politically) – and often it goes unperceived, at least directly. This could be the reason these waves through our physical world are often described as “immaterial”. But, like “the ambience that is literature”, these vibrations act on us – between us, with us – anyway.Angela Glindemann has had an essay included in an anthology published by UQP.