Sarah Quigley: Fifty Days

Reviewed by SIOBHAN HARVEY

There's a deceptive simplicity to Sarah Quigley's new novel. With two novels — After Robert and Shot — already under her belt, this New Zealand writer who lives in Berlin is fast becoming known internationally as a writer of lush prose. With the release of Fifty Days, she adds to this remit new skills, such as an ability to shape a world so delicate it's almost skeletal, and an eye for detail that can colour the most minor of human inter-actions with an ever-more unsettling picture of motives and motifs.

At heart, the story is a sombre confessional, the life of the somewhat unsettled artist Gest, who is slowly, mournfully exposed during the 50 days it takes to complete a commissioned portrait. As she ticks off time, bleak day by bleak day, she is overwhelmed by an eerie sense of her former self, her revelations coating the present and future with a sinister slant.

Gest's life is framed with a minimalist backdrop that exemplifies her disturbance: the unnamed city and burned-out building she lives and works in; the unspecified era in which action unfolds; the cast of characters rotating about her whose names she deletes and replaces with descriptive titles. So there are daily meetings and conversations with muse and model Candy Girl; a marriage of too many compromises to psychologist Ordinary Man; a past as a porn star and drug addict; a son whose unspoken absence clearly haunts her.

Cleverly, as Gest crafts the picture, so Candy Girl fleshes out her life also: love and conflict with boyfriend, Micro; a failed career as a baby-sitter; narcotics; self-mutilation.

All this is woven together with the kind of unique use of lyrical language and imagery that hallmarked last year's insightful poetry collection, Love In a Bookshop Or Your Money Back.

This said, the work isn't without faults. Its narration — omniscient, camera-eyed — tells us what to look out for, how to think and feel. It seems, at first, fresh, but, after 300 pages, can bear heavily down upon us, like an oppressive parent.

But in truth we're ready to forgive Fifty Days anything. Even its failings can't detract from the shrewdness of the drip-fed story or Quigley's power to startle and compel. It's the care and despair of human interaction in this third novel, the all-too-real and possible failings we might share, which live with us long after we've finished the final page.

* Siobhan Harvey is an Auckland writer and tutor