Damien Wilkins: Nineteen Widows Under Ash

(Victoria University Press $29.95)

Review: Michele Hewitson

Evelyn is driving across a country. She reckons 3200km across the United States is about the right distance to go to get away from a husband. Her 13-year-old daughter, Victoria, is in the car, and the radio is tuned, as a form of adolescent joke, to a Christian soft-rock station.

The two are fleeing a domestic life where the fault lines have been exposed, and heading for a danger zone where a volcano is about to blow.

Evelyn, a woman whose demeanour is as dry as a parched throat in an ash storm, is not about to consider the contradictions.

Nor is she likely to give much consideration to the perils of turning up, unannounced and quite possibly unwelcome, at the house she grew up in with her mother, the ice-cool Celia who died of cancer, and her stepfather, Gerry, a man with a passion for lava flow and ballroom dancing. Evelyn and Celia, after all, in their pre-Gerry lives, flitted from guest room to guest room, relative to relative, wearing out welcomes and tempers as they went.

Home now provides an odd sort of haven, as the familiar, once fled from, sometimes does: "It was a strange surprise to see the things she'd fully expected."

It makes some sort of sense. To retreat to a place where, as a teenager, before punk reared its mohawked head, Evelyn had had a crush on, had postered her walls with, images of ashfalls, smoky craters, lahars. Now the adult Evelyn stands in the backyard smoking, occasionally dropping ash on Celia's hen, Alicia-Rose, a Chinese Silky which has outlived its owner and any usefulness it may have had. And which Gerry wished would die "so he could take vacations with a clear conscience."

Instead he inherits more responsibility: a step-daughter and a step-granddaughter who arrive in an area where people have already packed their cars ready to flee when the mountain erupts.

Meanwhile, the people of the Pacific North-west town go on living lives made hazy and claustrophobic by ash-fall and the ever-present threat of the volcano. Odd things begin happening: uncharacteristic outbursts, a car crash, sinister telephone calls.

Even the domestic becomes dangerous: "There was a tiny feeling in the room, a constriction, with all their emotions sharpened until each was nothing more than a pointed end, mean and needled and ready to jab. As relief, anything outsize would do."

There is a suffocating sense of "impending calamity."

And of emerging from this book having taken a strange and compelling journey through a landscape where "haze hung, a fine, lead-coloured gauze that dropped and lifted with the wind ... "

It is remarkable for its carnival of characters who say and do the unexpected, and a masterly control of tone which never falters.

A meditation on the big issues, life and death, written with an austere elegance this is, simply, a wonderful book.

* Michele Hewitson is a Herald feature writer.