In pursuit of fables and answers

Limestone by Fiona Farrell. Photo / Supplied

Fiona Farrell's sixth novel follows Clare Lacey, who's in Ireland for two purposes. Ostensibly and professionally she's at an Art Historians' Conference (theme: Location / Dis-location, which is pretty apposite).

Privately and symbolically she's seeking her story-telling father, who skimmed so lightly above ordinary life that it was no real surprise when he vanished from it. Clare has lived "detached from all other human beings". She's careful, guarded, evasive, knows she can never be good enough. Now she makes a leap of courage and/or recklessness.

Her pursuit of a fabled land and an answer takes her between frowsty Oamaru living room and assembly-line hotel, dark European caves and the glare of a New Zealand summer, a traffic fatality in London and a grey concrete tower in San Francisco. The title? "Limestone is a gentle teacher ... about time, and patience, and the beauty in the accumulated detail of small insignificant lives."

It's also the ancient galleries where Clare sees "art rising like a fish through stone". It's a wall built after a child is damaged forever, illusory snow on an Irish hilltop, the treacherous bones of osteopetrosis. Metaphors like these stud a book whose prose glitters with the world's business and busy-ness.

Farrell is a terrific observer and itemiser. So we get Cork, smelling of wet diesel and sea salt. A South Island river "surging brilliant blue streaked with milky white around shingle islands glossy with yellow broom". There's the content of the Evening Echo, a child hiding among potato rows, "liking the sour-sweet smell of the flowers and watching tiny emerald beetles walking upside down on their leaves". There's even an inventory of salt-and-pepper shakers.

Farrell writes richly, sensuously. She adds things in, rather than leaving things out. Be prepared for this. Be prepared also for the immediacy and vividness of her prose. It jumps with energy; quotable line follows exuberant image. You'll recognise human types: Clare's mother, who wants everything to be immaculate; Murray in economy class, "brand new Crusaders tee-shirt over straining belly".

You'll recognise also the puzzlement over why hotels deem it necessary to fold toilet paper into an arrow point, the "rookery racket" of a convention, the shaven-headed, black-clad, tattooed, rattling-tongued young academic. There's a lot of research, worn eagerly.

Farrell does an excellent Fine Arts Tour, from Lascaux to internet. She goes on a bit about the New Right and about TV ads; goes on a bit also with some of her repetitive cadences. But the plot is springy and inventive, characters are engaging (or engagingly repellent), language is witty, chatty, and flecked with that characteristic Fiona Farrell subversive mischief.

And you'll be pleased to hear that by the end, Clare has found an understanding, made a discovery, and seen a promising chance. No, I'm not telling.

Limestone
By Fiona Farrell (Vintage $29.99)

* David Hill is a Taranaki writer.