Lindsey Dawson: Lipstick in the Dust

Reviewed by SUSANA CARRYER

Imagine four well-travelled people, each highly successful in the field of fashion advertising, used to the luxuries of life, arriving in a Tibetan hotel. At least there's hot water in the taps.

Within a few days they are stranded in a remote village, suffering from altitude sickness and dysentery, without telephone communication to the rest of the world - and they're lucky if there's hot water in the morning.

As they become further and further removed from all that is familiar and comfortable, they also become increasingly entwined in the politics and spirituality of this remote and hauntingly beautiful land.

It's a very strange sort of beauty though, as one of the characters notes. "It's so hard and rocky, but fragile somehow, like crystal. It's like if you could knock on it, it might shatter. In tropical places, the beauty's more ... bendable."

Differing conceptions of beauty form the central motif of Lipstick in the Dust. As she learns to recognise the beauty in this cold, dry, arid and empty landscape, Tommi the supermodel begins to question her assumptions about her own beauty.

The relativity of cultural perceptions is a part of this questioning, as a Chinese bureaucrat ponders the senselessness of using someone as ugly as the tall, thin, brown-skinned, pale-haired model to try to sell any product.

But the story also uses a particular feature of the Tibetan language to convey this theme. In Tibetan, the concepts of beauty and happiness are conveyed by the same word, kyipo. Not surprisingly, the supermodel in her turn struggles to conceive how anyone could consider a shabbily dressed, prematurely aged peasant woman more beautiful than herself, regardless of how much serenity, warmth and strength are revealed in her eyes. By the end of the novel, however, she begins to understand.

Dawson builds a dramatic tension that keeps the reader deeply engrossed, and maintains this tension despite the descriptive prose that invites a more leisurely read in order to fully appreciate the landscape being evoked.

This juxtaposition of writing techniques mirrors the side-by-side placement within the story of a rich and beautiful high-fashion advertising model and her photography crew, against the bleak Tibetan countryside, inhabited by poverty-stricken and oppressed people. In this way textual structure and plot work together to convey the central message of the book.

For the average New Zealand reader, the world of high-fashion advertising and that of a Tibetan peasant are equally foreign. Dawson uses this double dislocation to suspend judgment, allowing the reader to accompany the main characters through the most bizarre sequence of events, without being distracted by incredulity. As a series of disasters gradually robs these successful and beautiful people of all the familiar supports of Western society, they are confronted with their deepest fears and a growing self-knowledge. This new awareness frees them to enter into the lives of total strangers and act with unexpected integrity and honour.

Using yet another symbolic contradiction, inner beauty is revealed when all vestiges of Western elegance and cleanliness have been stripped away.

The somewhat erratic progress of the main characters in changing their attitudes is entirely believable, even if the constant barrage of natural disasters and untimely deaths seems a little unlikely, even for Tibet. The ultimate outcome of the novel is perhaps predictable. However, the route from beginning to end is full of twists and surprises, both delightful and distressing.

Simultaneously amusing and deeply moving, easy to read and thought provoking, this novel should appeal to wide variety of readers.

Black Swan, $26.95

* Susana Carryer is an Auckland theologian.

* Lindsey Dawson will talk about her new novel at a morning-tea function at the Takapuna library on Tuesday, April 8, at 10am. Admission $2.