Fiona Farrell: Light readings

By DENNIS McELDOWNEY*

In one of Fiona Farrell's stories, Rag Bag, the narrator remembers that her mother kept everything she might find useful later on. She saved rags (to be made into a rug), string, recipes, rubber bands, safety pins. It so irritated her daughters that they made a point of saving nothing.

Then it occurs to the narrator that she is still a hoarder, of scraps of conversation, odd episodes, inconsequential gestures. She resolves to tack them together into a novel, but nothing comes of it.

This could be autobiographical, except that Farrell makes good use of her ragbag. Her realistic stories, typically of family life, are put in a new light by oddments read and remembered.

Some of these references are tricky. There is a young woman on the travelator in an airport terminal, a few steps behind her boyfriend, wondering whether she is wise to leave her own country for another, whether it will be a better place, especially as there are so many going the other way. The title of the story is Che faro senz' Euridice, an aria from Gluck's opera based on the Greek legend of Orpheus and Eurydice. Only this gives the reader the clue that Farrell is likening an airport to the fateful path from Hades to Earth. It takes less knowledge to appreciate a story in which another woman's life is seen through the pages of The Edmonds Cook Book.

Farrell collects words as well, and this is nowhere shown better than in the title of the book, Light Readings. Think of all the meanings of "light": the play of light, a camera operator's light readings, lightning, enlightenment, highlight, to lighten a burden, lightweight, light fiction, light reading. They are played with especially in the first story and the last.

In the novella-length The Play of Light, which opens the book, a 16-year-old boy is going blind from an inherited disease.

His parents take him and his young sister to Europe, ostensibly on a family holiday, actually to fill Tom's mind with images, especially from art galleries, to serve him in his coming darkness. Tom divines their motive and bitterly resents it, as he does any attempt to show pity. His sister is bored.

On the surface this is a straightforward if potentially tragic story about teenagers and parents, husband and wife, brother and sister, something Farrell is notably good at. But it is punctuated with quotations from a book about odd manifestations of light, which help to give it a mysterious edge. I found it totally engrossing and very moving.

By contrast some of the later stories are, well, lightweight, though still enjoyable to read. Farrell has an unfashionable liking for happy endings. The cynic in me may be sceptical, but the sentimentalist in me happily sheds tears.

Vintage

$24.95

* Dennis McEldowney is a writer who lives in Auckland.