KEY POINTS:
Fiction is the art of creating possibilities. Within the first few pages of Emily Perkins' cracking psychological thriller, Novel About My Wife, we have a raft of them on our hands. The narrator's wife Ann, we learn from the outset, is dead: some facts, as a recurring refrain through the text has it, are known.
But there are several immediately plausible answers as to how she has died - a stalker, a massive abdominal growth glimpsed on an ultrasound, possible mental instability, a disaster on the London Underground in which Ann has been caught up - so that at least as many suspects are crowded into our mental space as into any Agatha Christie drawing room.
Tom Stone is a struggling London-based screenwriter, with a single big credit to his name, the rather earnest story of love on the wrong side of the tracks; a critical rather than a financial success. We meet him as he is coming to terms with Ann's death - when he's trying to re-imagine her in words, in a novel.
That endeavour takes us back to the point at which all the various suspects first emerged, in the aftermath of the incident on the underground and around the time of the scan that has shown up her healthy 20-week baby and that sinister growth.
Around the same time, Tom has learned that the producer of a film he is drafting - which is all signed up - is chucking it in, wiping out whatever tenuous hopes poor Tom may have entertained of financial security. To make matters worse, Ann has begun reporting a stalker - a hooded, probably homeless man, who has been dogging her steps to work and appearing in the windows at home.
Tom casts about for work, forced to swallow his pride and go begging to an acquaintance who is something of a high-flyer in the same industry, always jetting off to the United States and on first or nickname basis with all the right people on both sides of the camera.
Finally, he is cast a lifeline by an Australian film magnate by the name of Halliburton. "Hallie" was the instigator, in many ways, of Tom and Ann's marriage, for it was on a research trip to Fiji in connection with a script he was working on that Tom proposed to her - and indeed, it was on the same trip that he wed her.
Some facts are known. We know Hallie is an Aussie, and we know Ann is Australian-born, too. We also quickly come to suspect that there is more than the connection of nationality between the two.
Interspersed with Tom's account of the final months of his wife's life, there are various attempts he makes at imagining exactly what happened on their wedding night, when he was off drinking with Hallie and she inexplicably locked herself in their bure.
He doesn't get it. All these years later, it's clear he still doesn't quite get it, and the rest of the narrative serves only to highlight the silences and the failures of communication in their relationship. It's the unknown that has assumed such a terrible power in their lives.
In Tom Stone, Perkins creates a character who is at once sympathetic and exasperating. It's a rare feat: the unreliable first-person narrator is among the trickier stunts in the novelist's repertoire, but it's spectacular when it comes off.
Add to this the bright, acerbic edge to her prose, the adroit management of all those possibilities, and this is a terrific read.
* John McCrystal is a Wellington reviewer.
Novel About My Wife
by Emily Perkins (Bloomsbury $35)
