Imogen de la Bere: The Welcoming Committee

By KAY DE RUYTER

Imogen de la Bere peoples her novels with leading characters called Jenner Ransfield, Palliser Wentwood and Crawford Hollander - names suggesting a dignity and moral correctness that their behaviour does not match.

As this, her third novel, opens Crawford Hollander, wine merchant and music lover, surrounded by adoring women, is attending a modern production of the Berlioz opera Faust in London. Finding the production not to his taste, he abandons his wife, Genista, and visits his young mistress, Mercy. This selfishness and lack of regard for others sets the tone of his behaviour for the novel.

The story is set in New Zealand, where Hollander had spent his youth, and he returns there with Mercy and Genista to visit his sister Rosalie, still trapped in the family home and dependent on the help of gardener and handyman Rewi.

Hollander hatches a plan to purchase, for a quick and profitable sale, a vineyard run by a skilled German winemaker who is reluctantly bound to Hollander.

Unlikeable as he is, Hollander is the most fully realised character and provides the wittiest lines in the book. The women exist simply as extensions of him and are stereotypical, not always arousing sympathy.

De la Bere presents love in its various forms, and also shows how love prevents characters from breaking free from their situations. It is the people in this novel who love too much who leave themselves open to exploitation.

But in true operatic style, good will win over evil, the sins of the past must be confronted, and three men from Hollander's past form the eponymous welcoming committee. The reader, having picked up clues from the first chapters, knows that this end will come and so the interest lies in finding out how the inevitable happens.

The author divides her time between England and New Zealand and has a scholarly interest in music and the arts. Her writing is fluent and eloquent, and reminds this reviewer of the work of Shonagh Koea (Staying Home and Being Rotten). Some of the Kiwi speech patterns do not ring true, having a grandness that doesn't fit the characters, and the writing is a little over-dramatic in the last chapters. But if you don't take the characters too seriously, it's ultimately a very stylish and entertaining read.

Jonathan Cape $34.95


* Kay de Ruyter is an Auckland reviewer.