Alan Loney: The Falling: A Memoir

By MARGIE THOMSON

When the Wellington to Auckland train plunged off the broken Tangiwai bridge into the turbulent water of the Whangaehu River on Christmas Eve, 1953, it pulled 151 people to their deaths, including a childhood friend of the author, 14-year-old Robert Hale.

Robert's death has haunted Loney ever since, and in The Falling he sets out to explore why this is so, and to try to get himself, as he says, "off the train."

The result is a beautiful and brave personal investigation by a man who is every inch a poet, and who demonstrates here an extraordinary facility with and control over language. At various times he takes on the voice of Robert himself, falling and yet somehow suspended until such time as Loney will let him finish.

The author explores back and forth, into his own impoverished and violent childhood, into the places of his past which are now much changed, his essentially lonely adulthood, into Greek mythology, down convoluted linguistic pathways, but arriving at simple, brutal truths that he announces with a searing, icy clarity.

There is a dark, obsessive tone to the story at times, a sense of a mysterious exploitation of one person's death for another person's meaning, yet Loney's exploration is poignant rather than drear, and we sense his need to resolve this ancient loss which is somehow symbolic of the darkness within his own life, and want him to do so, and are satisfied with the point he arrives at.

AUP

$29.95