Damien Wilkins: Chemistry

By JOHN McCRYSTAL*

After his trip abroad in his highly acclaimed Nineteen Widows Under Ash, which was set in the United States, Damien Wilkins is back.

It's as though now he's shown that he can write about any part of the world, he's decided going to write about this one.

Jamie, a long-term junkie, returns to Timaru after an operation to remove a kidney stone. His mother is there, but as his brother, who is a chemist, and his sister, who is a doctor, are there too, the reader is entitled to presume he's not going back for the home-cooking.

Meanwhile, Sally, who is on the methadone programme, and her boyfriend, Shane, who is not, are concocting a blackmail scheme to try to kickstart their stalled prospects. At first, there doesn't seem to be a connection.

Chemistry is constructed in much the same way as Nineteen Widows: we are introduced to the characters and at a given moment, an incident occurs - the car accident in Nineteen Widows, the execution of the blackmail scheme here - which sets them all on a collision course. This, of course, makes it sound all very contrived and deliberate, but it manages to slip that collar through the sheer quality of the observation and the writing.

Wilkins excels at selecting and presenting the little things - the colour and texture of an overcoat, the finger smudges on a window - that surround the big things. It is a skill akin to that of the set-builder, who creates such verisimilitude on the stage that the players cannot help but fall snugly into their roles.

Meanwhile, too, without even seeming to take aim, he hits targets outside his story. There's a meditation on need here - it's hard to ignore the juxtaposition of family obligations and chemical addiction. And there's a strikingly life-like, warty portrait of life in New Zealand.

In this respect, I found myself remembering Maurice Gee's Crime Stories, and as soon as that comparison had occurred, others followed.

The characters are not so cranky and difficult as Evelyn and company from Nineteen Widows but this is not to say that they lack depth or topography. None of them is necessarily that appealing, but it's hard not to like them or at least to understand them. None is wholly selfish, none is wholly without need and self-interest.

Somehow, it doesn't seem as though quite as much effort has gone into Chemistry as into Nineteen Widows. But it is perhaps because of its effortlessness that I felt Chemistry to be the better book.

Victoria University Press

$34.95

* John McCrystal is an Auckland freelance writer.