Tim Corballis: Below

By DENNIS McELDOWNEY

Tim Corballis has been appearing for some years in literary journals such as Landfall and Sport as a writer of accomplished short stories. This is his first novel, and before publication it won the Adam Award for a first novel.

Todd, the asthmatic son of separated parents, has left his job to do a PhD in mathematics. His girlfriend has left him and he spends his days in his office and his flat and walking between them, with occasional sorties into the pub.

At weekends he goes caving in country round Waitomo with a casual acquaintance named Philip. An earlier companion of Philip's disappeared while caving and Philip obsessively traverses that one cave as though he might find Chris still alive.

But if Philip's behaviour is mysterious, so at times is Todd's. He lives in an uncertain world, where walls move in on him and then retreat, and people likewise, even when they are standing still.

Sometimes this follows smoking a joint but not usually. He is awkward with people, finds it hard to interpret them, tends to speak in monosyllables.

His departed girlfriend described him as "opaque", said he was "never there".

He is capable of playing quirky games. He walks into a strange flat, claiming to the bemused occupants that a friend lives there, that he recognises his stereo, and demanding to know where he is.

But mostly he is not so confident, even mildly autistic. There are other women after his partner leaves him. Two end in his bed, but they make the moves, not he.

To Todd, unsurprisingly, the attraction of caving and mathematics, the connection between them, is the distance of both from ordinary life. Even caving is a kind of abstraction, and he finds abstractions easier to deal with.

To the author, both are also metaphors for Todd's life - in caving, the hard rocks, the narrow awkward passages, the possibility of drowning in underground streams; in mathematics, events dissolving into parallel lines and a continuum of points going on unsettlingly to infinity.

The novel is dense with symbolism, much of it pointing to death. (Is Todd's name a reminder of the German "tod", death?)

The cave Philip obsessively moves through is "Deadmans": others are called Dead End, Hate, Bad Luck, Hidden - but there is also a Phoenix and a Love, as though there is hope.

Corballis makes few concessions to readers unfamiliar with the languages of caving and mathematics, but he always writes well and at most times clearly. He is good on places and people observed in a slightly hallucinatory light.

But the short-story writer has not quite become a novelist. There is little feeling of impetus towards a climax. There is no real climax. It is the kind of first novel which, if he goes on writing, will be seen as significant in his career, but does not yet make it on its own.

* Dennis McEldowney is a writer and former publisher who lives in Auckland.

Victoria University Press

$24.95