SOURCE: Gerrard, Nicci. “Truth and Deception.” Observer (11 February 2001): 15.

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...