Kelly Ana Morey: Grace Is Gone

Reviewed by SIOBHAN HARVEY

In Grace Is Gone Kelly Anna Morey swiftly follows up her 2004 Hubert Church Best First Book winner, Bloom.

In part, this second novel is about a ghost: absent and insubstantial, an image which, sadly, is emblematic of the novel itself.

The plot sounds interesting: Cherry Flower, daughter of potent septagenarian Billy and sister to 11 female siblings, works as a photojournalist's assistant amongst the horrors and morbidity of the world's most blighted regions: the Congo, Afghanistan et al. Suddenly, she flees her oppressive husband, Baxter Worthington, and their London life, returning home to small-town New Zealand idyll, Meridian.

The trouble is, too often there's a deficiency of detail. For instance, immersing herself among her family, Cherry never shows any emotional reaction to the tragedies she's left behind. Unaccountably, it's as if they never happened, or she — like a phantom — floated through her previous existence.

The introduction of ghost Grace adds to the reader's uncertainties. Around her, Morey sketches a parallel after-life, one predicated upon three precepts: television repeats; God's authoritarian presence; and levitating, lotus-positioned manifestations. It's a bizarre and unsatisfactory envisioning, one made the more
unconvincing by Cherry's composure when Grace, yogic-like, appears before her.

Elsewhere the novel suffers from a contradictory abundance of information. For example, there is a vast cast. Morey engrosses herself in the lives of 13 Flowers, multi-farious mothers, partners, children, extended family and neighbours, numerous townsfolk, various animals and a proliferation of hangers-on. Quite simply, with sub-plots about a production of A Midsummer Night's Dream, a
missing child and other dead-ends, it's exceedingly difficult for the reader to keep abreast of each character and remember who they are and what their connection to Cherry is.

This is a shame, because some characters are emotively drawn, particularly Cherry's sister Willow and her husband Moses, who hide the adoption of their first-born when both were 15, and now, much later in life, struggle to conceive a child their family will let them keep.

But ultimately, such tender evocations can't save a novel whose perpetual detours into the lives of its minor characters even edge out its protagonists, including Grace, who disappears off the radar by the end, her ill-explained position seemingly abandoned entirely.

At nearly 400 pages, Grace Is Gone is a long read and a frustrating one, in a way that only a novel with too many characters and too little specificity can be.

Penguin $28

* Siobhan Harvey is an Auckland writer and tutor

* Kelly Ana Morey will speak at the Going West Books and Writers Festival, Between the Lines, September 10-12.