Chris Else: On River Road

Reviewed by CHRIS ELSE

In Dunedin writer Chris Else's fourth novel, all is not well in the non-descript trendy satellite town of Durry. There's been a fatal hit and run. The victim is 16-year-old Carla, a feisty girl who has flung herself on her bike to head to the river to defend a victim of bullying.

The getaway car is, of course, a white nondescript Japanese number. Or is it? And so the first of seemingly endless cracks in Durry's emotional infrastructure begin to appear.

Carla's parents, Tom and Lisa, are part of a tight group of four couples who have always been there for each other. What unfolds is a 350-page dialogue depicting a network of relationships feeling the strain and in some cases collapsing under the weight of Carla's death.

On River Road is heavily loaded with sexually charged situations. Affairs are taking place all over the place in Durry. The reader is never really taken into the heart of this town, but is swamped by the dialogue of its inhabitants. In fact, you start to feel that Durry is a seriously neurotic place to live.

As if anticipating this, Else keeps an underlying current alive. One of the network of friends was seen driving a white Toyota on River Rd the day Carla was hit. City councillor Ward confesses to hitting the bike but not Carla. A yellow car then enters the frame, spotted by Ward speeding past him after he hit Carla's bike. Meanwhile, another member of the inner circle is charged with a different murder.

While the soap opera that is Durry intensifies, Tom's mission to find and accuse whoever it was driving that yellow car reaches its climax.

Intentional or not, Else has done a wonderful job of portraying just how soul-less, lonely and devoid of intimacy, human comfort and reassurance the lives of those who inhabit the huge houses in those satellite suburbs we speed past on the motorway really might be.

Vintage $26.95

* Nigel Gearing is an ESOL teacher and freelance writer