Book Review: The Below Country

Book cover of The Below Country. Photo / Supplied

The Below Country by Nicholas Edlin
Penguin $30

Christchurch-born, Britain-based Edlin's first novel, The Widow's Daughter, was a crammed narrative of World War II Auckland, and the reverberations of a sexual liaison across decades and oceans. It was commendably ambitious and inevitably uneven.

His second work contains similar elements: a plot that cuts from New Zealand to North America and South Korea; mysteries plural; a pervasive motif of loss. This time, they're rendered with increasing confidence and competence.

Mae is a criminal prosecutor with a growing reputation. She's successful but not happy, still in denial of her alcoholic, self-destructive mother, her equally drink-destroyed, disastrous, crime novelist father, and the whole idea of fiction.

But a moment of betrayal, followed by a ghastly catastrophe, the wreck of her marriage with a husband who turns to a "ridiculous religion", and a major meltdown, takes her to a therapist who urges her to write things out.

She makes an "improbable, whimsical return to the country my heart had never truly allowed me to leave" (more on the writing later), and she's off to Seoul in time for the 1988 Olympics, searching for the truth of her father's part in the Korean War.

With her goes a journal of dark deeds and a "Significant Photo". The former holds entries in cod-Hemingway style that made their way into her dad's noir thrillers. The latter holds a chilling secret of political cleansing in a remote field, which is finally revealed after encounters with a Sherlock Holmes-loving ex-boyfriend, a small automaton from the Tourism and Olympic Games Special Committee, and a lot of swing music.

Ghosts are laid. So is the heroine. Guilt is partly expiated. One chance of happiness is lost. Another still precariously stands, along with a tenuous reconciliation.

It's a novel where, once again, stylistic embellishments abound. Adjectives and adverbs flourish: "her creamy pink shawl falling glamorously about her narrow, tanned shoulders"; "the few wispy strands of white hair that remained on his dimpled head fell lankly". Every object is a potential metaphor; every moment is a potential tableau. Characters are pumped up with description and dialogue. Edlin still can't stop himself from telling us things - feelings, moods, relationships.

However, it's an affecting, effective read. There's energy and authenticity, a powerful evocation of impending tragedy. Some is better than the whole, but the story of a woman painfully fitting herself back together will hold and move you.

David Hill is a Taranaki writer.