Laurence Fearnley: Delphine's Run

Reviewed by MARGIE THOMSON

There are several dangers that lurk within this strange, disturbing novel, and the greatest one turns out to be that of believing what we are told.

The plot twists in such unexpected ways that, even as we arrive at the final sentence, we are still madly revising everything we know of the narrator, unsure of the line between self-delusion, wilful deception and our own failure to see what is right under our noses.

I suppose it is this final, threatening uncertainty (and the bomb blast that occurs about halfway through the novel) that makes this, as the publicity blurb claims, a thriller. But again, it's so disconcerting that it's not till the last few pages that we are really convinced it fits that genre.

Instead, it is a sad tale of a young woman's bleak existence, told as a minute, blow-by-blow rendering of certain key events, and of the texture of her life. Delphine, around 19, works as a food-trolley girl on the Brest-Paris train. "I've only ever been to Paris and I go there - there and back, there and back - twice a day," she tells us.

Her life seems tightly circumscribed both in terms of opportunity (she left school at 13 to care single-handedly for her mentally ill mother) and emotionally (she has suffered so much loss and neglect that her grief and anger are bottled up inside her, to the extent that she occupies herself almost entirely with trivialities as a way of deflecting her pain).

She falls in love with Charlotte, a highly educated marine biologist 10 years her senior who nevertheless hangs out with the punks of Brest. Charlotte is involved in demonstrations against Chirac's refusal to give official recognition to the Breton language, so Delphine also becomes peripherally and briefly involved in them, as a ploy to see Charlotte.

There is no eye of God at work here: we know only what Delphine knows. Our perception of the shadowy figures at the edges of her life - her friends Dany and Javier, her flatmate Yasmine, her mad mother Lucette, her father and stepfather - is only what she chooses to reveal to us and, perhaps because of her extreme vulnerability, she is not the most trustworthy of raconteurs. Bit by bit, surreptitiously, information is let slip, and only slowly does enigma become realisation.

She's a marvellous character, full of complexity and contradiction, guile and innocence, intelligence yet ignorance, kindness yet with a streak of brutal, animal selfishness.

She can be very frustrating. We often want to give her a good shake, as time after time, at key points in her story, she slithers away from matters at hand and begins a monologue about something of seemingly compete insignificance, perhaps the idiosyncrasies of English tourists, or details of preparing snails at her father's famous Parisian restaurant, or even the best espresso machine she ever had, at her old flat in Paris.

As it turns out, none of these things is as trivial as it first appears, and we later realise that Fearnley has hidden little clues in the most unlikely places. What Delphine says of Javier is just as true of her: "The things he hadn't told her were more important than the things he had."

Fearnley has done something rare among New Zealand novelists: written a book that doesn't even mention New Zealand, apart from a few strands of Crowded 'ouse overheard in a bar. This indicates a wonderfully unselfconscious narrative voice.

The world Fearnley creates is tight and self-contained, the characters' cultural references are mostly narrow, their dreams of escape are the expected ones. Delphine watches sailors at the Tour Tanguy and longs for the Azores and her father plans a new life in New Caledonia.

Delphine's Run reminded me of Doris Lessing's The Good Terrorist, which was a sharply personal and even despairing rebuttal of the kind of politics that blithely inflicts physical damage on others. Fearnley's novel does not feel personal, but it's also a cynical exploration of the people who plot (and sometimes carry out) terrorist acts, but a more filtered, more oblique approach to the question.

Through Delphine, we sympathise about what a terrible life she's had and we become caught up in what follows: a bomb blast on Delphine's train, and her odd flight into hiding.

The question of implication - in injustice, in crime - flies like sticky soot over this clever novel. It is captivating and stimulating, and Delphine's story is at once so ordinary, so sad, so creepy.

Penguin, $27.95