Nick Hyde: Camilla Vanilla

Vintage $24.95

Review: David Hill*

It's been an 11-year gap between Nick Hyde's first and second novels. You certainly can't accuse him of stampeding into print.

The author note indicates that Hyde spends a fair amount of time travelling. The setting and cast of Camilla Vanilla indicate the same.

To the Mediterranean island paradise of Serafini stray exiles and expats from other parts of Europe.

There's Julia of the proudly echoing voice, computer genius Barry who lives in a cave, Martin the narrator. Their lives and narratives are studies in futility. Hyde means it this way. It's especially the case with Martin and his infatuation with delectable, vapidly vampiric Camilla, a girl with absence as much as presence.

At first there's a flicker of vivid cafe and beach scenes. But increasingly the plot narrows to Martin's unrequited erotomania.

Off he goes to London. Back he comes to gloom his way through the Mediterranean sunshine.

As summer advances and the yoberati arrive, Serafini becomes a grab-bag of posturing itinerants, hormones in overdrive, brains in neutral.

There's a certain fascination in watching moderately mature Martin plodding after his Trivial Pursuit. Alhough Hyde has an enjoyable, inventive time trying to give unity and purpose to lives that are fragmented and inert, he doesn't succeed.

There are good set pieces, like the name-day party with host in an avocado-coloured shirt whose peaked collars throw his chest into shade. There's brisk present tense, agile sentences, and much witty talk where everyone anatomises everyone else.

Enviable one-line encapsulations dart past: an old man blackening in the sun like a banana. Some lush lyricism labours by: hills become a black velvet curtain.

At times, Camilla Vanilla becomes a casualty of its own cleverness. Pages are spangled with individually clever and cumulatively clogging wordplays (Island of the Dimmed ... Hey, Big Splendour ... a koala stuck up a glum tree).

Like the glittering sea and rocks of Serafini, they make you long for a bit of shade.

Combined with Camilla's gorgeous gormlessness, it all means much energy going into ingenious asides that forget to go forward. Each chapter flashes and performs, but for the reader as well as our anti-hero, very little finally comes across.

There's a moment halfway through when Martin hands his lacklustre love a book: a work of fiction, a good idea drawn out to an untenable length. But nicely written.

Hey, Hyde is anticipating his reviewers.

* David Hill is a Taranaki writer.