The bird metaphor is strong throughout, and occasionally a little strained, as if the novel would like to take flight into another genre, a novel-in-verse, like those of Anne Kennedy and Dorothy Porter. The elderly Primrose residents call like mallards across the pond, the deadlines imposed on Hannah as a freelance editor symbolise crows that flap through her isolation. Events are related closely to the duck's behaviour and development.
Lonely and sad, longing for someone to love, Hannah works through her grief, stumbling and occasionally falling, but eventually pulling the pieces of her life together. There are beautifully subtle, multilayered explorations of family relationships, the nature of memory - especially the memory of falling in love - and how long marriages may survive.
White encapsulates the contemporary phenomenon in modern relationships of man and wife plugged into their websites of choice. The novel feels very current, with husband Simon going away to work in earthquake-ravaged Christchurch, just as the unnamed Auckland suburb fills up with apartment buildings and townhouse developments, and its depiction of the almost-retired still caring for ailing parents.
A reader could think that perhaps, occasionally, too many details are given of the duckling's appearance and his "splats", his food and his baths, until the realisation dawns that the book may be read not only as a novel, but also for its wealth of detail about how to successfully raise a baby mallard.
White's second novel (after Across the Dreaming Night) is a how-to manual - how to love, how to grieve, how to pick up your life after death and go on. Wry and clever, The Elusive Language of Ducks transcends its bleak theme to leave us as thoughtful and questioning as its gentle protagonist.
