Book review: The Last Days Of The National Costume

'The Last Days of the National Costume' by Anne Kennedy.

The Last Days Of The National Costume by Anne Kennedy
Allen & Unwin $36.99

Anne Kennedy is an award-winning poet who has also developed a solid reputation writing novels and screenplays. She taught fiction and screenwriting at the University of Hawaii until recently and her latest poetry collection, The Darling North (Auckland University Press), cements her place as a significant New Zealand poet.

Kennedy's new novel, The Last Days of the National Costume, is a goldmine for students of literature. It is the story of GoGo Sligo, a young woman who has abandoned literary studies in favour of stitchcraft. The metaphorical connections between writing/reading and embroidery/sewing are prolific.

Set in Auckland's blackout of 1998, the unfolding tale is, as the blurb says, one of "illicit love, passion and embroidery".

GoGo lives with her husband, Art, in a semi-conversion in Arch Hill that has been plunged into perpetual darkness, dust and damp.

Art has almost completed his PhD on a literary topic, he tutors at the university and has a wealthy family in Taranaki (dried fruit).

GoGo has a modest business repairing torn garments and has become more interested in the truth and lies behind each rip and tear, usually illicit.

A young punk woman wearing tartan Doc Martens brings in a garment to be mended with invisible stitching - an Irish "dancing dress a la Riverdance". GoGo gets caught up in the origins of the dress and, in the manner of storytellers from the past, holds the true
owner (the client) captive through the power and allure of story.

This is where Kennedy's narrative takes flight into remarkable writing - from the perpetual fears of a Belfast family (the client's) to the looming rack and ruin of the Taranaki in-laws.

It is, however, a novel of many parts - a novel of undergarments that might intrigue the literary student or fan of post-modernist literature.

There is the silk slip of ideas, the cotton shift of cultural referencing, the thermal singlet of intertextuality, the woollen long johns of theory, the merino vest of authorial intrusions. Together this layering produces a sumptuous reading experience.

But I did find the use of film directors, movies, books, authors, music and other cultural reference points (low and high) as similes and metaphors stalled my reading (which might be the point) in the first part of the book.

GoGo did warn that she "might stray down a few self-centred alleyways occasionally".

Once the client starts to recount their story (a bit like A Thousand And One Nights), GoGo continuously delays the completion of the garment until the next day, not to postpone death but to draw in love by way of story.

At one point, she confesses that she is the granddaughter of storytellers but "stories are over. Now we can just undo them". Kennedy's novel renders such a claim impotent.

This is a narrative in which characters are undone - and where the hurts, losses and infidelities are then repaired with visible stitching. It is also a novel that, at its very best, shows a story can survive theoretical cul-de-sacs, and astonish us. A love story stitched with heat and heart.