The good, the bad and the brilliant

Marina Endicott. Photo / Greg Bowker

Marina Endicott witnessed a two-car collision that provided the starting point for Good to a Fault, winner of the Commonwealth Writers' Prize in the Canada and Caribbean region.

A well-presented woman clambered, apologetically, out of a well-presented car while 10 to 15 people spewed out of an old wreck, shrieking and yelling. The incident, "both slapstick and disaster", forms the opening scene of Endicott's extraordinary novel.

Endicott's description of the event is mesmerising, catching perfectly the way time slows and the world fades to a distance at a single catastrophic moment. The car crash is a miniature version of the second high-impact event of the novel: a mother's discovery that she has cancer.

The woman from the beaten-up car becomes a shadowy, hospitalised figure about whom life slowly and tentatively moves. The world beyond her becomes hyper-real, each relationship tested and more acute.

Clara Purdy, the apologetic crash victim, steps out of her own self-loathing and takes the woman's homeless children and pernickety mother-in-law into her home.

Clara, then, becomes the physical and emotional heart of the novel, and the catalyst for the novel's key questions: how to be good and how to do good? The answers form countless variations in most of the characters and "good" becomes a smudgy concept. To be or do good goes hand in hand with less than good and encompasses health, humility, generosity, the acceptance of difference, the preservation of faith and the lack of faith.

Some characters - and for some this might be a failing of the novel - are represented solely in the light of their goodness. We get to know Mrs Zenko, superficially, through her ability to feed and care for the children. In contrast we get to know Mrs Pell, the unpredictable mother-in-law, through her self-centredness and her questionable care of her grandchildren.

At the novel's midpoint the narrative seemed precariously balanced and while I was driven to keep reading without pause, I wondered how Endicott would manage the final third. The novel could so easily tip into a high-level comfort zone and provide an acceptable if somewhat sentimental ending, or alternatively, take the other route and offer a gut-wrenching tragedy that taints you for a week.

The last third of the book, however, elevates the characters and the difficult subject matter into a realm of sheer brilliance. The deft plotting and the twists, turns and overturns in how characters behave make sure you don't view the heart-wrenching situation in black and white, or simply in the light of good and not good.

Endicott's novel does provoke some unsettling questions. Do women need children, for example, to emerge from life-numbing slumbers?

For me, this novel slams in the face of political correctness and stands as a daring and insightful representation of an individual situation, not how it ought to be necessarily but how it is.

The novel is so satisfyingly contoured on a number of levels, through dark and light, joy and pain, wit and seriousness. I highly recommend it.

Good To A Fault
by Marina Endicott(Allen and Unwin $35)
Reviewed by Paula Green

Lives less ordinary

Alex Miller is the Miles Franklin Award winner for Journey to the Stone Country and The Ancestor Game.

Both novels signal a writer who writes with intelligence, finesse and is strong on character.

Miller's latest novel, Lovesong, is essentially a love story. One that is filtered through the imagination of the ageing writer we meet in the opening pages.

Ken claims he has retired from writing and is going to do what retired people do, "travel and enjoy themselves and sleep in in the mornings". Then he meets someone who has a story too good to ignore. That love story is the main course of Miller's novel, but we get to meet Ken and his adult daughter at various points and, in these brief encounters, find little gems on the business of writing stories. "Writing," he tells us, "is a conversation."

The heat, the heart and the issues that drive the novel, however, are in the central love story. John Patterner is an Australian taking time out from his fledgling teaching career to tour Europe. Sabiha, a Tunisian, has come to Paris to support her grieving Aunt Houria, after the death of her husband.

When John and Sabiha meet in Chez Nom, Houria's cafe, it is love at first sight, and marriage shortly later.

At times, the heat between the two characters is almost suffocating but as certain things remain unspoken, an unbearable distance offsets the scalding relationship. We get to see what is on their minds, but they stew in their own issues.

More than anything, their marriage is tested by Sabiha's deep-seated desire to have a baby, a baby not forthcoming. The marriage is then tested by Sabiha's solution.

Life is often stranger than fiction, so why can't a novel create a situation that rattles our suspension of disbelief? I ask this because I was not altogether convinced by Sabiha's choices, but after dwelling on the course of action I realise the whole novel is governed by out-of-the-ordinary decisions.

These decisions, by Sabiha, John and Ken, raise questions that form the subtle under-heating of the narrative. What do we need to do to give our lives value? To whom do stories belong?

Lovesong is also a tribute to the value of storytelling and, if it is a love story, it is also that of falling in love with story itself; the way we all harbour stories that make us who we are.

Miller conjures the world at its most intimate and vulnerable in sentences that slowly and surely, with grace and leanness, bring interior lives into a beautiful and challenging focus.

I recommend it Paula Green is an Auckland poet and children's writer.

Lovesong
by Alex Miller (Allen and Unwin $39.99)
Reviewed by Paula Green