Fiona Farrell: The Hopeful Traveller

By MARGIE THOMSON

The salient point about The Hopeful Traveller is that it is a book of two halves, which begin at either end, upside down to each other.

The stories told in each half are independent, yet parallel. "One book, two beginnings," it tells us on the cover - so, where to begin? In 1851, or today (a time so current the characters discuss the World Trade Centre attacks)? I let fate take a hand - close my eyes, turn the book over and over - and fate plumps for chronology. We begin in 1851 and move forwards.

Various things are happening: a man named Harry Head goes to the Great Exhibition in London, marvels at human inventiveness and is no longer satisfied with his quiet village life. He sets off, bag on his back, for the New World.

A gardener named Firmin is happy with his lot, toiling quietly in the gardens of the English gentry, until some local scions disturb his peace with their romanticism and idealism. They, the idle rich, feel "trapped in this ridiculous country that is dying as all civilised countries must ... We are all in despair". They form a plan to escape civilisation, taking Firmin, their "philosopher-melonist" (and the only one with any survival skills), with them.

The group of four ends up buying an island at the end of the world - somewhere just off the coast of New Zealand - and creating Harmonia, which is, in fact, anything but.

Meanwhile, the sixth character in this half-book, May, is being orphaned. Her mother dies, with due Victorian pathos, in a ditch, her baby suckling her lifeless breast as a rat nibbles at her fingers. May endures childhood in an orphanage and eventually makes her way, too, via a series of mishaps, to that outcrop of land at the bottom of the world.

The lives of these six characters, each one certainly driven by hope, tangle in the swamps and bush of the small island on which they all, in their own fashion, crash-land.

This is a land in which theory does not do well. Romanticism - and its impractical advocates - dies here in the cold light of day; but, mind you, this is a novel in which death is never quite what it seems. Whatever dies may bloom again in a different guise, so that while death is all around - as excrement, corpses, failed ideals - it never fails to give life, and so time cycles on.

Meanwhile, back in the future a further six characters are preparing to spend one of their number's 50th birthday on that same island, which is now facing an uncertain future as tourist resort or conservation park.

They are three couples in various stages of decomposition as they travel the weary path through life. They share a history, but do they share a future? All are in the grip of longing: Ellie (who eschews parsimony and simply craves the perfect dinner party with Real Conversation) and Mike (constantly in the process of escaping his underprivileged childhood through financial ambition and success); Rose (mourning the death of her adult son) and Brian (bored with his life, helpless in the face of her grief); Louise (being rejected by her illicit lover, grieving for her own beauty as age approaches, resentful of her husband) and Midge (placid gardener, speechless in the face of nature's wonder).

"Where in this whole impermanent world is safe?" wonders Rose, thus touching on one of the themes of this novel.

By the end of the segment everyone has, more or less, what they wished for. Whether it makes them happy, well that's another matter.

Farrell indulges in a tumultuous richness of language that, to begin with, is quite unnerving. In the first chapter of the 1851 segment it almost bogged me down, trapping me in single sentences that elaborated on themselves seemingly without end: "Harry stood at the centre of a wide world where there was no path to force him in a given direction, no law to mark his right of way, no route other than the one a man might lay down for himself in accordance with his own instinct and confined only by the limitations imposed by his own strength, inclination, imagination and the forces of nature itself." Phew.

But I'm glad I pushed on through this barricade, because I came to love the book. The sentences settle down, but that same richness - of both theme and language - imbues it with sometimes startlingly sensual imagery ("the ecstatic buzz of a bumble bee writhing in pear blossom like a fat lover on white linen sheets") and in the end creates characters and worlds that you utterly believe in, and an odd, at times mythic-feeling story that you become, imaginatively, thoroughly involved with.

Time, of course, is the vessel upon which all these characters travel so hopefully - and I suppose that's why Farrell has structured the novel as she has - but it will, as we know, eventually pull away, leaving them all behind, forgotten and unknown - and there is plenty of evidence of this sober fact already on that little island.

Yes, you have to work for your pleasure in these pages, but that makes it all the more worthwhile.

Vintage

$26.95