Personal and global perspectives

THE VILLA AT THE EDGE OF THE EMPIRE: One Hundred Ways to Read a City<br><b>Fiona Farrell<br></b><i>Vintage/Penguin Random House
THE VILLA AT THE EDGE OF THE EMPIRE: One Hundred Ways to Read a City<br><b>Fiona Farrell<br></b><i>Vintage/Penguin Random House
Oamaru born novelist Fiona Farrell has been a Cantabrian for many years, so I was looking forward to reading her response to the quakes.

The Villa at the Edge of the Empire has four sections. The first (and longest), ''The Map'', is a personal, Christchurch centred story.

''The Loop'' homes in on part of the Avon Loop, a beloved city edge location full of family life and community politics led by people such as the Locke family.

''L'Aquila'' compares an Italian quake response to ours. The last, ''The Villa at the Edge of the Empire'', pulls everything together.

''The Map'' (she returns several times to metaphors of maps or government blueprints as controlling instruments) explores the fear engendered by the quakes when, as she puts it, ''six hundred and fifty kilometres of brooding tension that had hovered forever like some moustachioed villain in the wings, awaiting the moment to make his entrance'' smashed the city and its surrounds.

Then there are the stories of the munted buildings, roads and parks, the sense of loss, the insurance hassles and above all, the politics of demolition and of the rebuild.

She describes how a simple car trip to get a printer cartridge, return a library book and pick up some coffee beans becomes a cross between an obstacle course and a safari thanks to broken roads, cordons and business relocations.

''Driving about the city became a kind of game, a lucky dip where you came across signs or drew a complete blank.''

Forget the phone directory. Its entries recorded a ''phantom city''. I don't agree that this is ''the most ideologically free market government in New Zealand's history'' but I can understand her frustrations about the restrictions on democracy or the creation of arbitrary new precincts (at one point she laments ''a pleasure dome fit for the children of Brownleegrad'').

The last sections lift this book above conventional quake tales. In the course of her research, she travelled to the ancient Italian city of L'Aquila. In 2009, tremors left a much higher percentage of its population homeless, but no ministers called for razing ''old dungers'', and the city is restoring wherever possible.

''Not all houses are created equal'' she notes.

''Not all cities are spaces and opportunity, and when they are broken, we can choose, as they have in L'Aquila, to retain . . . or we can choose, as we have in Christchurch, to start again from the scratchings of bulldozers in that silty soil.''

The villa in the title, by the way, refers not to a Kiwi timber house but to a Roman villa excavated in the UK.

The house was clearly Romano British, following the ancient forms, but showed inferior workmanship, as if the builders were struggling to remember old techniques and to make do with inferior materials.

In this, she reflects on her world view; that's where the ''empire'' part of the title comes in. In earlier parts of the book, she describes her southern youth in provinces still coloured by their British Empire past and only just coming under the sway of America's.

Now, she's a citizen of a new empire centred on Beijing where ''I have access to endless supplies of cheap socks funded by the endless secretions of seven million dairy cows''.

She's also ''the citizen of the empire of insurance'' where the terms of the policy are as closely disputed as the clauses of the Treaty of Waitangi.

The Villa at the Edge of the Empire is the first of two books on the subject. The next will be a novel.

Gavin McLean is a Wellington historian.

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