Stephanie Johnson: Music From A Distant Room

Reviewed by SUSAN JACOBS

At the heart of this new novel by 2003 Deutz Medal for Fiction
winner Stephanie Johnson is the mystery of how Carl Tyler, a gifted pianist, died.

In the weeks after the funeral his mother Nola and girlfriend Tamara try to piece together his life before Tamara returns to her native America. Each woman yearns to learn what the other has to recount. "I'll give you his beginning," says Nola, "and then you can tell me his ending. In exchange."

But, predictably, this is no ordinary mystery. The plot is a slippery thread
subsumed to the act of story-telling,
filtered through the prism of memory. As intended, the reader becomes distracted. It is a tribute to Johnson's skill that this is not a bad thing.

It is a slow, simultaneous unravelling and stitching together of events that begin with young beautiful Nola, a school dental nurse and sometime beauty queen, noticing bruises on the body of one of her young charges, Brett Tyler. This leads her to meeting and falling in love with his loner hunk of a father, Bernie, who lives on a boat.

When Bernie goes to have it out with the perpetrator, Brett's stepfather, Nola's life lurches into chaos. What follows results in the separation of Bernie and Nola and the birth of Carl, who is blind.

In subsequent years Nola cares for Carl and her flamboyant mother Peg, changes
profession to become a fortune-teller, reading hands on cruise ships, while Carl attends Homai College for the Blind and discovers his passion for music. But these rudimentary elements do not
capture the essence of the book.

The novel weaves from past to present, from first to third person perspective, fleshing out the inner lives and daily paraphernalia of its characters. When Tamara asks Nola to tell her about their shipboard life the narrative performs a subtle shift so that we feel the boy's jealous understanding of his mother's romantic interests through the smell of her face powder.

On a deeper level the novel explores the creative power of memory, the stories we fashion to explain our lives and how these intersect and conflict with others' remembering. We sense the tragedy of wasted lives, missed opportunities, the shock of random events over which we have no control and how they change lives for ever.

Apportioning blame and trying to tie up loose ends is more the artifice of conventional mystery plots than the messy, often inexplicable bitter-sweet stuff of everyday living. Here, finding meaning can be an act of survival. Yet this is a
gentle treatment of such weighty
concerns.

Although it was initially hard to engage with the characters, in such
capable hands as Johnson's it is impossible not to be drawn into their stories. Slowly, inexorably, with deft touches she subtly builds up her canvas of fictional lives so that texture, colour and detail merge into a solid, satisfying whole. Always there is the writing, which is sensuous and strong with a superb clarity and freshness. Her intense evoking of Auckland, from its dreary suburban streets to the swampy inlets of the Manukau Harbour, results in a sense of both familiarity and strangeness.

We finish the novel feeling that people and their stories matter and, yes, we do find out how Carl died. From inside their skin, ordinary lives possess grandeur and a quiet imaginative power. Johnson's extraordinary talent is to capture this.

Random House, $26.95

* Susan Jacobs is the author of Fighting With the Enemy: New Zealand POWs and the Italian Resistance.