Peter Wells: Iridescence

Reviewed by DAVID LARSEN

New, improved 19th century! Now with shit and erections!

You find the phrasing overly blunt? I could say it like this, if you prefer: "Peter Wells' absorbing new novel brings an unusual degree of inclusive physicality to the staid realm of historical fiction." But delicacy and circumlocution seem very much out of place here - here being Napier, circa 1872. A taste:

"The woman was wearing, Samuel noted, a pale grey faux-silk edged with an amethyst fringing. The whole effect was too emphatic, too furbelowed. Around them working men and women, children, animals and dogs. A horse nearby, as if sensing something contumely, arched its plumy tail and slithered out a glittering rope of shit."

Samuel is a recent arrival from London, clearly in flight from some ruinous scandal. Who or what he was in London is unclear, but Napier, a rough frontier town on the edge of an unexplored wilderness, suits him about as well as a closed coffin. He's desperate to escape.

This at first seems to be the point of Wells' insistence that we not pretend, as we're so used to doing, that high society ladies of the 19th century never had to pick their way around steaming piles of horseshit. We're seeing with Samuel's eyes and, to him, Napier is a howling wasteland, filthy, smelly, utterly undesirable.

But Wells' real point is more powerful. It gradually emerges that the scandal dogging Samuel's heels is his friendship - or perhaps more than friendship - with the actress at the centre of a famous indecency trial. This woman, Fanny Clinton, had the gift of self-creation, of "fabulous camouflage": she created personas for herself and her friends which let them go beyond the limitations of their usual social roles.

The heart of the book is a long flashback to the trial itself, in which Wells ably pillories the sexual hypocrisy of 19th-century British society. This is where all the horseshit references begin to bite, because while the reader is unavoidably confronted with the full physical reality of both Napier and London - the smell, the noise, the taste and feel of a world with no hygiene and not much privacy - its inhabitants screen out most of it. Horseshit? What horseshit?

Fanny is humiliated, and ultimately destroyed, by men and women who insist that their reality is the only reality, and their social norms the only possible standard of decency. But meanwhile they are engaged, as Wells forcibly reminds us, in a constant process of doctoring their own sense-data. Faced with a pile of dung, or any of a hundred other embarrassments, they simply convince themselves it isn't there. By throwing away the usual standards of literary politesse, Wells is able to show that sexual role playing is only one of a vast number of harmless, slightly ridiculous deceptions humans practise every day.

This is a substantial novel in every sense, using a great many pages to cover a great deal of ground. I don't believe 19th-century New Zealand has been this well served in fiction before, and certainly 19th-century Napier hasn't. The infant town in its glorious surroundings is one of the book's strongest presences, and it's hard not to be moved by Samuel's slowly dawning love for it and its people. The final pages have a tender grace to them, a respect for the redemptive possibilities of everyday life, which had me in tears.

Those final pages take a good bit of reaching. Where some 450-page novels seem to fly by in a flash, this one has the subjective weight of a long train journey. For the most part this is a good thing. You can lose yourself in the story, and emerge feeling that you've travelled a long way. But sometimes I had the sense that I was plodding where I wanted to be soaring, and the reason was always the same: clumsy use of language.

Wells is generally an intelligent writer, with a gift for unusual metaphors and thoughtful turns of phrase - such as his superb description of the way Fanny and her co-accused lose their social status during the trial. "By this time they were non-people. They were vacant spaces. They were whatever anyone could say about them."

But he also tends to use words in ways that don't quite work. In the passage I opened this review with, the horse acts "as if sensing something contumely". You can't sense something contumely, any more than you can sense something onion, because contumely is a noun. Being a rarely used noun, and one which looks like an adverb, it will throw many readers. Too many moments of wondering whether it's you or Wells that's got something wrong, and your reading pace slows right down, and the book starts to feel too long.

This is not a minor defect. It's this novel's only defect, though, and when you set it against an involving story, a powerful evocation of our social history, and a memorable set of characters, it starts to seem pretty forgivable. This is without question one of the most important New Zealand novels of the year.

* David Larsen is an Auckland reviewer.

Vintage, $34.95