I sometimes think there's a distinct South Island literary style. Owen Marshall, Brian Turner, Fiona Farrell, Maurice Gee: there's a measured pace about their cadences and characters; a gravity of tone, yet with an undercutting irreverence; an engagement with the wide, framing physical landscape that you don't seem to find so often north of Cook Strait. Those qualities of people defined against a physical environment, decisions made soberly rather than spontaneously, an existence closer to the bone, are also among the underpinnings of Dunedin-based Laurence Fearnley's accomplished new novel.
Fearnley has always been fascinated by the choices people make, and Reach is full of her close, meticulous observations of the tensions between and within individuals, backgrounded by those between the same individuals and their setting.
So we have Quinn, focused to the point of obsession on her edgy artworks of empty uterus, enigmatic hands or birds of prey; indifferent, even brutal towards others; not giving a stuff about the neighbourhood; content to hold a non-locking gate open with a brick.
And we have Marcus the vet, wrecking his marriage to be with Quinn, now in a slow-motion rebound towards resentment, watching himself flounder as he struggles to keep contact with his hurt, estranged daughter.
Plus there's the complicating presence of itinerant, risk-taking Callum in his inconsiderately parked housetruck, a deep-water diver with an existence of few essentials, forever startled at people's indelicacy towards his beautiful sea.
