Kirsty Gunn: Featherstone

By JANE WESTAWAY

The term "poetic" is often applied to Kirsty Gunn's prose, and I wonder why real poets don't rise up as a body in howls of protest. Yes, I know she's been translated into nine languages, that they filmed her first novel, Rain, and that her second, The Keepsake, was shortlisted for the Montana New Zealand Book Awards.

And I know that refusing to join in the songs of praise dumps me on the edge of a town like Featherstone, the title and setting of her new novel.

But poetry is an exact art, requiring ruthless skill. What it isn't - if it's any good - is abstract and generalised, repetitive and inaccurate. So, yes, Featherstone is "poetic" - this quality rises from its pages like fake fog in a horror movie. But poetic it ain't.

Try this: "He looked, with his hands at his forehead that way against the light, and he thought he did know her, though the light was bright on her, and around her bright, and at her back, like foil. It was late, late afternoon."

And: "Ray. Ray. Ray. Margaret felt a glut, of the things she saw in Ray, too much." (Too much, comma use, perhaps.) And: "Johnny was thinking how by hell bright it was indoors. How it must be dark outside, he was thinking, or maybe he said it to Gaye. How dark, or bright. Couldn't be sure what he'd said really for the drink he'd been on - been on it some time now, since Margaret opened, and bright it was now, hell, and late."

The novel opens with elderly resident Sonny in his garden, sensing the return of a favourite niece (there's a lot of sensing in Featherstone). So, sooner or later, do a number of others, including ex-lover Ray (of whom, too much). We learn little about young Francie except the way people have been pining for her since her departure.

Gunn introduces eight points of view over the first 80 pages, thus diluting any loyalty a reader might feel towards any of them. They all speak and think (and sense) in the same generic, arty vernacular. Over and over we're told about them, and over and over we fail to care: neither their internal nor their community lives exhibit bite or juiciness.

One character quivers with fitful interest - the improbably named Mary Susan, a pubescent beauty dying for modeldom and male attention. Unfortunately, by the end, she has experienced some of the latter. More unfortunately, and despite mentioning a few cuts and bruises, Gunn manages to romanticise even this, and so dispose of her character's humanity: "The damage, of course it's there, on Mary Susan's lovely face but something more, this understanding more powerful than anything that's happened. To know that we can learn to bear ourselves, hold up and let whatever happens come - we can suffer and not feel the spoil, know damage but not let ourselves be damaged."

By now we don't expect anyone to call a doctor or inform the police; this is Featherstone, after all, where the river is blue, and inhabitants live at a level of portentousness likely to make the average reader feel like a clod. It affects even inanimate objects: a telephone cannot ring without being loud, insistent, terrifying, awful.

Featherstone is about hope and love, and how life without them is impossible - a perfectly respectable theme - but it takes more than wooden characters and some wordplay on feathers and stones to bring it to life. For a masterful portrayal of an isolated small town see Kate Grenville's The Idea of Perfection - convincingly precise and human.

Gunn's writing seems self-indulgent and dismissive of the reader, every paragraph haunted by a voice insisting: "Look at me, I'm a Writer". The small town she depicts is certainly not the Wairarapa settlement (plus an e), nor any other known to ordinary man - it's Artsville. And I didn't enjoy my visit.

Faber & Faber

$34.95

* Jane Westaway is a Wellington writer.