Before it had even
been launched Auckland author Emily Perkins’ latest novel The Forrests (Bloomsbury, $36.99) was being tipped to win this
year’s Booker prize. I don’t pretend to know what the gong-givers are looking
for but I found this a curiously old-fashioned book in some ways, very strongly
reminiscent of Virginia Woolf’s To The
Lighthouse and, while strikingly well written, sometimes quite frustrating
to read.
It is the story,
from childhood to old age, of Dorothy Forrest. Hers is an ordinary life in many
ways, but one that captures the spirit of the eras she lives through and with
aspects that will resonate with most of us.
At the age of
seven she moves with her family from New York to suburban Auckland. Her father
is a disappointed actor, her mother a would-be hippy and Dorothy’s world
revolves round her siblings Michael, Eve and Ruth, as well as Daniel, the
neighbourhood boy they unofficially adopt.
The entire sweep
of a life and all the people that are important to it is a lot to fit into a
novel of fewer than 350 pages. We’re moved through Dorothy’s teenage years, her
disappointments in love, her struggle with marriage and motherhood, her losses
and greatest longings, on to middle age and finally to the confusion of her
final days. Almost each chapter takes us several years forward from the last so
there’s a sense of time galloping by – just as in life it tends to. Dorothy is
old and looking back on it all before you know it.
Perkins unbalances
the reader by employing the technique of observing in microscopic detail many
trivial or background things – there is plenty of weather, often a dog barking
somewhere the distance, descriptions of all sorts of small stuff – but then
skimming quickly over major events, or omitting them altogether. In the same vein, by far the most important
person in Dorothy’s life rarely makes an appearance. Enigmatic Daniel has
flings with both her and her sister Eve, is the one man she loves all her life
long, and yet disappears to travel the world and thereafter only revisits the
narrative briefly.
While effective in
some ways, the gaps in the story left me experiencing Dorothy as series of
vignettes rather than a whole person. Meeting her as the agoraphobic mother of
young children I didn’t recognise the spirited teenager I’d got to know a few
chapters earlier. And I never went beyond feeling like an observer of her life
rather than involved or affected by it.
Perkins is
undoubtedly one of the most talented contemporary New Zealand writers but, in
its structure and style, The Forrests
often felt to me like a writing exercise - albeit one that she has executed
brilliantly.
It may win prizes,
possibly even the big one, but given that the Man Booker long-list is yet to be
announced, speculation seems premature. While the buzz is bound to be good for
book sales, Perkins has held her silence on the subject and I don’t blame her!
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