THE WIDOW'S DAUGHTER
Nicholas Edlin
Penguin, $30, pbk.
The Widow's Daughter is the first novel by Nicholas Edlin, a young New Zealander working his OE as a legal adviser in London.
It has a fascinating primary setting, Auckland in the early 1940s during the "invasion" in World War 2 by those reluctantly accepted protectors, the United States marines, who were, according to the old joke, "overdressed, overpaid, oversexed and over here".
Some New Zealand fiction has used this setting in the past: most notably Fiona Kidman's Paddy's Puzzle (1983), and a novel for younger readers, Maurice Gee's The Champion (1989).
Several other good novels also focused on the US military presence in New Zealand during World War 2, but not primarily in Auckland: Norman Harvey's Any Old Dollars, Mister? (1963), Yolanda Drummond's Meeting the Americans (1983) and Elizabeth Knox's Glamour and the Sea (1996).
Edlin's novel comes at that time from a different angle, from the point of view of a US marine rather than of the New Zealanders.
In attempting to do so, Edlin uses the complex narrative method Maurice Gee perfected in the Plumb trilogy: Peter Sokel, a retrospective first-person narrator in California in the 1960s tells the story of his misadventures in Auckland in the 1940s, interspersed with an account of what is happening to him as he tells the story and comes to understand the effect the past has had on him, and consequently changes his attitude towards his situation in the present.
There are further postmodern twists to this method: in the narrative present, Peter is on the way to San Francisco to attend the launch of a novel called The Widow's Daughter, written about him by someone he knew in the marines in Auckland, and on the way he picks up Eddie, a hitchhiker who has read an advance copy of that novel and who tells Peter the story, and later writes a New Yorker short story about his encounter with Peter.
The novel is an ambitious undertaking.
Gail Pittaway said of it on a Radio New Zealand review that there is "a very complicated set of things happening", resulting in a "many-layered" novel.
She was "very impressed" and found the book "very cleverly written".
I find it more problematic, with the accomplishment falling short of the ambition, primarily because Edlin tries to include too much from too many genres: the historical novel, the psychological novel, the Gothic novel, the thriller, with a bit of postmodernism for good measure.
There is ample material for a good psychological novel with an historical background in the development of Peter in that Auckland wartime setting, but it is sacrificed to the page-turner plotting of a Gothic thriller.
The postmodern device of the novel and story within the novel complicates those interests and is not used as fully as it might have been, but it is relevant to Peter's development, for it is while he is listening to Eddie's account of the novel-within-the-novel that he comes to see the disastrous effect his past has had on his relationship with his long-suffering partner.
However, the central story of that past degenerates into a kind of Gothic romance, with a prostitute masquerading as the widow's daughter, a spooky old house in a lightning storm, a mad Nazi psychiatrist disguised as a sinister servant who could have been played by Boris Karloff, his damaged and dangerous deranged son, a sinister Chinese brothel bouncer out of 1930s' melodrama, a secret Axis spy plot with coded messages - enough creaking plot-machinery for several bad films.
I would have liked to have seen Edlin develop further his main character and the sometimes vividly created wartime setting, but as it stands, a potentially interesting novel has been buried in dreck.
Penguin has bought the US and Canadian rights to the novel and is perhaps expecting the Gothic elements to sell, but if Edlin means to be a serous novelist rather than a writer of popular page-turners he would do better to focus on character and setting, jettison the Gothic elements and incorporate the thriller, postmodern and historical elements - as Charlotte Grimshaw has done in such a novel as Foreign City.
Lawrence Jones is an emeritus professor of English.
