Book Review: The Kindness Of Your Nature

Book cover of The Kindness Of Your Nature. Photo / Supplied

The Kindness Of Your Nature by Linda Olsson
Penguin $40

Linda Olsson's novels sell in mega-numbers overseas. There are many places in this tender, loving story where you can understand why.

Like her previous books, it's much concerned with searching and healing.

Marion/Marianne, a middle-aged Swedish doctor-turned artist, has lived alone for 15 years by a wind-scoured North Island beach, sustaining herself with routines of walking, cooking, beach-combing. ("I had very little in the way of human intercourse, but I enjoyed the freedom.") Then she finds a small, silent 6-year-old boy lying prone on the sand.

He starts coming to her for soup, bread and music. She sees his bruises and realises their implications. One day, she saves him from the sea and realises she is also committed to rescuing him in other ways.

The bond of vulnerability and suffering that grows between them leads Marianne to confront her own childhood of "relentless grief", her abandoned marriage and flight halfway around the world.

She remembers safety and fear, the embrace of a grandfather, her beautiful, damaged mother, walking with a little brother "headed for the inescapable abyss" and an appalling death and disclosure.

Sounds formulaic? Thanks to the authenticity and integrity Olsson brings to the story, it never is.

Ika not only becomes Marianne's talisman; he makes her work more purposefully and feel more intensely than she has for decades.

Inevitably, the growing idyll is threatened. "Life is irrational and illogical", Marianne knew. But Olsson starts to guide her characters towards happiness once more.

It's hard to imagine a less showy or noisy novel. The writing is careful, reflective, formal. The narrative steps carefully, echoing the cadences of private, troubled lives. Details are meticulously evoked: lemons from a backyard tree; the white light of a lowering sun. Lives and their wounds are rendered with respect and a total absence of any moralising. You sense an author of real integrity.

You have to suspend disbelief on occasions, especially when it comes to Ika as piano virtuoso. You have to accept a tendency among characters to talk in absolutes and abstracts. But there's much satisfaction in this stoic, quietly-spoken narrative of forgiveness that includes self-forgiveness, and that even manages to include some slightly stiff but supportive scenes with CYPS.

David Hill is a Taranaki writer.