Getting to grips with grief

Lola, by Elizabeth Smither. Photo / Supplied

Elizabeth Smither is a prolific and award-winning writer with 17 volumes of poetry, six novels and a number of short story collections published. Her sixth novel, Lola, which explores love and death, is a real treat.

My engagement with Lola is filtered through the nearness of a death in my own family and I wondered how I would cope with a narrative that is set, in the first part of the book, in a funeral parlour. However, through the central character Lola and a captivating cast of extras, Smither makes the subject of death utterly readable.

The narrative faces death, pockets of darkness and pain and the funeral rituals in a way that is neither macabre nor disheartening. Instead we get a compassionate portrait of how a particular character makes her way through loss and gain.

Lola has had enough of funerals (and death?) and, in the second part of the book, moves to a smaller town to adopt a separate and remote existence. Yet, the comfort of human relations - psychologically, emotionally, physically and intellectually - wears away at her remoteness and separateness.

This is a novel of subtle and endearing disclosures. Of how to proceed with the arrival of absence and loss and then again with the arrival of unexpected presences. Lola finds she has two new men, a string quartet and a different daughter-in-law in her life. How Lola proceeds forms the emotional and intellectual heart of the novel.

The details of the funeral parlour struck a genuine chord with me, making me both grimace and smile in recognition but so, too, did the way the characters cope with the aftermath of death as time passes.
On the one hand there is the understated current of emotion that feeds into how Lola grieves and how she loves. On the other hand there are the philosophical musings that translate the ideas that buzz in the head.

Lola thinks back through the life and pain of her sister-in-law and considers it an "unknowing". She wonders if every headstone should recognise the way we know so little of our loved ones and say "The Unknown Alice Zander" or "The Unknown Ben". It underlines too how Lola holds herself apart and is known in little and different degrees by her friends and family.

Lola's friend Luigi ends up with a book of maxims and he dips into it whenever the need arises. The effect is like a little pebble tossed in the water, gently rippling into the narrative and the possibilities of character. In the midst of pages where the characters are in various stages of love and not-love, we read: "It is almost always a fault of one who loves not to realise he ceases to be loved."

Smither's skill as a poet ensures that her prose is both elegant and economical. There is a sense of concentration that is a favoured tool of the poet but less so of the novelist. Her terrific use of detail, sparing and lyrical, brings the characters and settings satisfyingly close. This book is a little treasure.

Paula Green is an Auckland poet and children's author.

Lola, by Elizabeth Smither, (Penguin $30)

Elizabeth Smither will appear at the Auckland Writers & Readers Festival, Aotea Centre, Friday May 14, 10.30am and with British poet Jill Dawson on the same day at 3pm.