Edwin and Matilda by Laurence Fearnley

Subtitled 'an unlikely love story', Fearnley's novel begins with Matilda and Jacob having their wedding photos taken. It's Edwin's last job before retiring as a wedding photographer and from the outset Matilda is strikingly unusual. She's unusual because she is small and thin to the point of fragility, her hair a very short crop and she's wearing a dark blue dress, not the normal white. And while a few insults fly between her groom and some well-oiled members of an adjacent wedding party, she is making a film with her video camera, of leaves.
    Weeks later, the couple haven't collected their photos - this happens from time to time - but Edwin is more preoccupied by the article about Franz Joseph glacier he happened to see in a tourist magazine. It showed a picture of the mother he hasn't seen since he was a child. For Edwin is rather unusual too. He was raised by his father, a doctor at a tuberculosis sanatorium among the hills of Otago where the air is dry and healing. His mother had disappeared when he was seven and he had been told by his father that she was dead.
    Edwin has put off doing anything about finding his mother for eight years, preferring to wait until he is retired. He decides his first port of call is the sanatorium where he lived as a boy, but on the way he drops by Matilda's house to deliver the photos. She doesn't want them of course, her marriage didn't go ahead, and somehow, because she wants to make a documentary, she ends up joining Edwin on his quest.
    The two seem strangely drawn to each other, and the novel gently takes you through their gradual courtship, but the novel has a lot more to it than that. Because the two of them each have a heart-breaking back-story that is slowly and carefully revealed. The story behind the defection of Edwin's mother is told as Edwin clumsily makes his way to Franz Joseph, with Matilda and her video camera.
We discover what he discovers as he discovers it, while Matilda ponders how much she will tell him, and when, about her own past. She too has had a difficult relationship with her mother and then there is the tragedy of her illness.
    Fearnley is a lovely writer, her prose is spare and simple, allowing her characters to tell their own story. It is a very compelling read - I found I couldn't put it down. The atmosphere of the sanatorium through a child's eyes, of the wide open spaces of Otago, the cramped spaces of motel units and the awkwardness of sharing a car with a comparative stranger are vividly laid on the page for the reader through the book's sensitive characters. While yes, the relationship of Edwin and Matilda is unusual - even, as the cover would have it, unlikely - the truthfulness of the story-telling makes it work.
 

Landscape with Solitary Figure by Shonagh Koea

Shonagh Koea's novels are difficult to pigeon-hole. Many of them deal with a similar protagonist, a woman of middle age, solitary and happy to be so, often avoiding the people who threaten to unsettle her peace. There will be events from the past that bubble away in the background, and this backstory is slowly revealed in Koea's wry and carefully considered prose.
    And so it is with Koea's latest novel. Ellis Leigh lives by herself in a bungalow by the sea, when a letter from a man she knew ten years before disturbs her calm. In the intervening years, Ellis has made a much needed escape - from another town by the sea that was once home, when she had a husband and young child. She has mistakenly returned thinking she will be happy there again, but the town is unwelcoming, its inhabitants sneering or frosty to the point of nastiness and even the climate is harsh.
     Her short time here, while she inhabits a beautiful house she has filled with fine furnishings and antiques, ends because of an act of singular cruelty.
    But now after all this time, Martin Dodd, tall and impeccably dressed and with a mellifluous voice that caresses every syllable, has had the gall to write her a letter. If she had known the letter was from him, she'd have bunged it unopened in the bin. Suddenly the past comes flooding back and the reader is treated to a slow unravelling of events as the story is filled in like patchwork.
     Having escaped to the city, Ellis mulls over what has happened and Koea treats us to rich descriptions of interiors and gardens, of fabrics and furnishings, which help make Ellis's story all the  more vivid. I love the small incidents, such as how Ellis acquired a particularly sought-after type of clivia, or a description of a garden party where her young son is bullied, the truly awful birthday party, in another garden - there are lots of gardens after all. And each one adds to the atmosphere, for this is a very atmospheric novel.
     This is not one of those books that seems to be full of dialogue - Ellis is too solitary for that- but when we are treated to them, the conversations are often darkly funny. Poor Ellis is treated to some rather off hand and belittling comments. It's only her son in London who is kind, sending money for airfares every other year, while a friend of his lets her use her apartment in Paris for a holiday - for once a place where Ellis feels safe.
    Koea creates a narrative on a fairly small scale, and perhaps this adds to the claustrophobia that is Ellis's over-riding fear, but it is a picture delicately wrought - rather like the cover of the book. You won't get carried away on a tide of action and sudden swoops of storyline that leave you breathless in a novel by this writer. It is more like something you savour - one of the fine wines that Martin Dodd waxes lyrical about perhaps. You have to be really good at what you do to write a book like this. And Koea is very good.

The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton

'Tis done! I have turned the last page of The Luminaries, one of the larger novels I have read in some time, a book which put me in mind of Dickens, with its varied cast of characters, atmospheric setting and complex plotting.
    The story begins when Walter Moody, a young man lately of Scotland, arrives in Hokitika to chance his luck on the goldfields. He steps into a hotel lounge, and finds himself in the midst of a group of twelve men from all walks of life who have gathered to discuss the death of one man, the disappearance of another and the possible attempted murder of a prostitute. There is a large amount of gold involved as well as scullduggery, fraud and revenge.
    It is late January, 1866, and the reader might be forgiven for imagining we are in the northern hemisphere as the weather is wild and wet, and miserable. But actually this is summer. For we are on the West Coast of the South Island of New Zealand, in a town just starting to flourish because of the gold rush, a frontier town with a treacherous bar where ships regularly founder and lives perish.
    Each character: the shipping merchant, Balfour, who is worried about a missing chest - the bank clerk, Frost, who has frittered away the commission on the sale of a deceased estate that perhaps shouldn't have been sold; the chemist, Pritchard, who has probably imported the opium that may have been involved in the crimes discussed; to name but three - has a story to tell that will become one part of the jigsaw that will produce a picture of what happened.
   And this picture takes time to describe, so the reader must sit back and be patient, like Walter Moody has to, and let the story be told. This accounts for the first three hundred and sixty odd pages. Each chapter has one of those little summaries that begins "In which ..." rather like you might find in a Victorian novel, and this is a big help in case you lose your way. With such a large cast of characters, this can easily happen.
    During the next chunk of the book, the reader finally gets swept along by the events that happen next, and the action really picks up with a court case and retribution to follow. The last chunk of the book winds back to the beginning with short abrupt chapters, in which the "In which" intros are often longer than the text that follows, and the story oddly enough seems to end quite well, even though we are nearer the beginning.
   The Luminaries is wonderfully written, recreating the West Coast gold rush and the odd types that might well have turned up there when there was nothing left to lose. With its rich prose wrought with care, engaging characters and a few decent nasty ones, and with its many layers - I didn't even get started on working out the significance of the astrology references - it is the kind of book you can happily read again and again - each reading offering up new riches. I wouldn't like to say if it was the best book on last year's Man Booker shortlist, but I for one was certainly not disappointed.