Short, episodic, mixing the surreal with everyday domestic realism, accompanied by evocative and imaginative drawings by Gerard Crewdson, the book is certainly not a traditional novel.
In her launch speech (available online) Elizabeth Knox referred to it as a "discontinuous narrative", and the author has picked up on this in several interviews in which she relates it to such works as Emily Perkins' The Forrests and Michael Ondaatje's Coming through Slaughter; stating that she distrusts linear narrative as a means of showing how we actually experience the world, she describes her book as a collection of "theatrical moments from a life".
Made up of 17 titled and mostly short "stories", the book reads like an experimental fiction. However, in its own way it yields some of the pleasures of traditional fiction (and the author says that she has been having her "own Maurice Gee fan club reunion").
At the centre is a fully imagined character, Philip Fetch, a 30ish Wellington lawyer, married with two younger children, a kind man who wants the best for his incompetent employee, his clients and his family, a man who when he was younger marched for various liberal causes and dreamed of making the world a better place. But increasingly he senses that his well-intentioned wishes are running against currents beyond his control.
His children are growing up into a media-saturated consumer society that might be slowly poisoning them with plastics and that is destroying its environment, his planned orchard is kept from fruition by recurrent winds, his employee is dying of cancer, he is aware that he is not sleeping well and that his body is ageing. He keeps encountering the ghost of his dead mother with whom he had never achieved intimate understanding and who had left him "feeling as if he had a small piece of gravel in his shoe that he couldn't remove and had to walk on for ever more".
If the book has a realised character in Philip it also has a realised setting; it is very much a Wellington novel, with Happy Valley, Island Bay and the south coast and even Unity Books. And if it does not have a linear plot, it does have a central development - the increasing anxiety and isolation of Philip as he feels "overwhelmed by his body and the world around him" but cannot communicate what he feels to his wife.
His anxiety and frustration are well captured in often humorous, sometimes surreal "theatrical moments": his crippling a cat while trying to save some birds; his discovery that if he wanted to save his family from plastics he would have to almost empty the kitchen of containers; his confrontation with the digger operator clearing the "wild" section next door for development, starting with the central pohutukawa tree; his anxiety dream about his inability to protect his children from lemurs; his uneasy time at a yuppie cocktail party.
Although the discontinuous narrative has meant there is no traditional plot resolution, there is a kind of resolve for Philip. (Those planning to read the book might like to leave off here, until they have finished it themselves.) His increasing anxiety culminates in a major heart attack which almost carries him away from all pain, but he returns to life.
There are two "endings". The first is "Hunting Reverie", when in a waking dream he goes hunting rabbits in France to get food for the family but discovers that he cannot shoot a rabbit and he instead takes a supermarket one home and is just barely able to butcher it for cooking, but is sickened by the process.
Perhaps Philip can only just cope with the hard things we must do as human animals to survive as parts of a natural cycle that makes no allowances for our wishes and our finer feelings.
But the second ending is entitled "Titan Arum", the name of the largest flower in the world, a Sumatran "corpse flower" that emits the smell of rotting flesh in order to attract the flies necessary for pollination. The title is symbolic, for Philip, on a biking expedition with his friend James, feels "invigorated by riding and the very fact of life", and finds he can talk to James about his visitations from his dead mother and knows he will now be able to talk to his wife about them.
He and James on their journey observe an old man stripping naked to reveal in his wasted flesh what they will be in 30 years - they find they can accept their mortality with a "God help us" and return home happy.
That night the sound of rain on the roof brings back to Philip the vivid memory of a happy time with his baby son and his wife in Barcelona in the rain, and he sees "these are the moments, just these" - the brief and wonderful efflorescence of happiness, lighting up the temporary flowering of individual lives as conscious creatures within an unconscious universe inevitably caught up in its blind processes of birth and death. We cannot set the world right, we cannot transcend death and pain, but we can find meaning in such moments, especially shared with others.
- Lawrence Jones is an emeritus professor of English.
