Laurence Fearnley: Butler's Ringlet

Reviewed by GORDON MCLAUCHLAN

When I read Laurence Fearnley's first work, a novella, I decided to abandon her. Her prose was poetic but inert, it seemed to me, too much hovering mood and not enough go-forward, to use the patois of the stadium. It annoyed me, as novels mostly do when nothing much happens outside the narrator's head.

I recant. I read Butler's Ringlet with some reluctance but soon began to relish it as an extraordinarily good story about two young, socially impoverished men in Central Otago and the estranged wife and son of one of them.

It goes like this. Warwick, an intense, thoughtful but cripplingly inarticulate young man, meets Sabine, daughter of a German father and Kiwi mother. They marry and do some serious OE in Europe, during which Warwick pines for the wide open skies and big mountains of home.

They return, live in Warwick's Otago home and have a son, Ecki.

Sabine had been a laboratory technician. She loves Warwick, but is bored and pines for the faster pulse of urban life. He decides he loves the place more than he loves Sabine. She leaves with Ecki to live in Germany.

Nearby lives Warwick's best friend, Dean, who has taken over his family's farm from a father he hates. The father blames him for the death of his younger brother. He is uncomplicated, likeable, cheerful and articulate and badly wants a partner to share the farmhouse with.

Then Sabine writes that she's bringing Ecki back for a holiday and asks Dean if she can stay at his place to save any complications if she moved back in with Warwick.

Doesn't sound riveting but it is, because the characters are so deftly and insightfully drawn. It would have been easy enough to stick to Southern Man stereotypes and to be bold and hagiographic about the hills and big paddocks of the south, but these people are as real and individual as anyone you know well, and the country and its fauna are given understated, but unalloyed affection.

It's one thing to admire the writing and characterisation in Butler's Ringlet, and I certainly do; and another thing to get pulled along by the narrative towards an unpredictable denouement, and I certainly did.

* Penguin, $28