KEY POINTS:
Carl Nixon's new novel, Rocking Horse Road, couldn't have a more compelling opening, with the discovery of the naked body of a teenage girl lying at the foot of the dunes on the Spit, south of New Brighton. It is December 21, 1980, early in the morning, "the summer already shaping up to be the hottest anyone could remember".
The girl, Lucy Asher, has been murdered, and her death will reverberate within the community for years to come. Nixon's locale is based on the actual Spit near Christchurch, with Rocking Horse Rd running through its finger of sandy land, an estuary on one side, the Pacific Ocean on the other. In his book, the Spit of the 1980s is portrayed as a tiny inward-looking community, where lives are easily scrutinised and judged. People think they know what everyone else is up to - but there are secrets.
The narrative of the novel, Nixon's first, is told from the various perspectives of a group of teenage boys who worshipped the slightly older Lucy in an awkward adolescent way. Twenty years on, the boys are now in their early 40s, still glued together by their obsession with Lucy, still collecting "evidence" on who may have killed her. They maintain a lockup full of newspaper clippings, tapes of "interviews" they've conducted with possible witnesses, photos of Lucy. And then they find her diary ...
Nixon initially wrote Rocking Horse Road as a "long" short story for the Press' summer fiction series published in January. It ran as a six-part, 12,000-word series. As a successful short story writer - his Fish n Chip Shop Song and Other Stories was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best First Book and prolific playwright, Nixon was keen to tackle a novel. He already had a beginning and an end - it was simply a matter of filling in the bits in the middle and "evolving" the text he already had.
"I attempted a novel a few years ago and found it very stressful," he says from his Christchurch home on a "very cold day, with a perfectly blue sky". "I didn't have faith in the material, I didn't think it could sustain me. But I was very comfortable with the location of this story, I was comfortable with the period, I knew the type of guys they were - although in no way is it autobiographical," he hastens to add.
That's a relief because as one of the boys, Grant, puts it, "Lucy's murder oozed sex" and, as it turns out, Nixon has quite a bit of "oozing" going on along Rocking Horse Rd. He laughs quietly.
"It's funny - this morning I went to St Margaret's College, which is a private school in Christchurch, and had a talk with a group of seventh-form girls who studied the short story for their exams. They had a whole lot of questions; I didn't think girls would be particularly interested in the story but they were. They could all relate to the boys in it. I was quite happy because they said they kept reading because they wanted to know who did it. It's got a murder-mystery hook to it."
But, without giving too much away, the hook doesn't necessarily come up with the bait dangling on the end. Rocking Horse Road has an ambivalence about it which keeps the reader guessing, although Nixon says the short story is even more equivocal than the novel. "The girls were frustrated with that - but they admitted it generated a lot of discussion and they all had different ideas about whodunnit," says Nixon. "In a way that means for me it was successful because if I had wrapped it up neatly with a bow, they could have just forgotten about it.
"In real life people's lives are full of ambiguity, things aren't resolved and go on for years."
One of the most interesting characters in the novel is Carolyn, Lucy's younger sister, who undertakes her own methodical investigation of the townships males - via sex.
"Carolyn is not in the short story. Lucy was an only child in the short story," explains Nixon. "Talking to the girls at the school, I was a wee bit uncomfortable that the only female character in the short story was a dead girl about the same age as them. Doesn't give them much to aspire to ..."
Because Rocking Horse Road starts at the end of 1980, the following year in the book includes the buildup to the Springbok Tour, where opposing views were accentuated even more - starkly and violently - in small towns. "It seems to be a good reference point as a year when there was a national loss of innocence at the same time as a private loss of innocence."
This is a good month for Nixon. Following the novels release, a play based on his short story The Raft (from Fish n Chip Shop Song) will open at the Court Theatre in Christchurch on July 28, a drama about the dynamics between four members of a family in an isolated crib on the West Coast. It's an inter-generational story, a genre Nixon is adept at building up in subtle steps that can end in a shattering climax.
"The relationships between parents and children have certainly been a theme that interests me but when I first submitted that collection to the publishers, there were too many with that, so I had to make a conscious decision to move away and explore other areas. You write what interests you but, obviously, if you're always writing the same stories in different forms it stops interesting the reader and you realise, 'I've done this before."
The day after The Raft opens, Nixon turns 40 - attaining the same age as his lads in Rocking Horse Road, some of whom have grown up more than others. As one of them concludes, "It seems entirely possible to us that our own lives are adrift - that we have spent the best years searching, and yet have gone nowhere that we planned."
Not so for Nixon. "It's an exciting time - it makes me feel as though something is happening; life's not passing me by."
Something doesn't seem quite right though. Rocking Horse Road is being launched at Canterbury University Bookshop as it was written during Nixon's Ursula Bethell Residency there last year. But Nixon reading from the book while standing amid the mid-winter bleakness of the real Rocking Horse Rd - sand flying, waves crashing, wind howling - now that would seem more appropriate to the wildness going on within its pages.
* Rocking Horse Road: Vintage/Random House, $27.99
