Communicating on many levels

Novelist Damien Wilkins. Photo / Mark Mitchell

Damien Wilkins' previous novel, The Fainter, was the work of a writer committed to refreshing the page not for the sake of revolution, but to test and stretch how a story can take shape.

Wilkins' latest novel is equally refreshing. Somebody Loves Us All is a novel of relations. Out of the substantial rendering of characters, with events and plot at their service, the book's magic rises.

Paddy Thompson, a speech therapist, comes into closer view in the light of those who surround him: his ex-wife, his new partner Helena, his close friend the cyclist, the father of a young client and, most importantly, his mother.

Paddy's mother, Teresa, has moved into the adjacent apartment but mysteriously acquires a French accent, perhaps triggered by a fall. Here lie multiple entry-points into the novel's pull. On a minor note, the fact that Teresa turns French is a fitting choice for a novel penned while Wilkins was in Menton courtesy of the 2008 New Zealand Post Mansfield Prize.

The way Wilkins draws upon this experience, both tentative (Teresa has little knowledge of the language) and surprising (she blames a tumour), is an utterly inventive response to a year in France: "She asked her tumour what the word for wind was: vent. The vent blew and blew. Le vent souffle aujourd'hui."

On a major note, and in contrast to the intriguing faintnesses of Wilkins' previous book, this is a novel of communications. Couple a speech therapist with a mother with Foreign Accent Syndrome and the possibilities are intricately satisfying.

The power of what we say and what is said to us, along with what we recall, is brought, at times, into sharp and enduring focus: "Did we have to listen and listen and listen, or talk and talk and talk, just to produce the material in sufficient bulk to allow our brains to sieve the good stuff? But then clearly we were still in danger of retaining not the good stuff but apparent dross also."

Speech is not simply talk but the body's curious communications that include muteness and gestures. The novel also benefits from the seamless inclusion of anecdotes, miniature guest narratives that provide a different tension or pace.

The mother's cycling trip as a young woman is a gem that slowly and steadily creeps up on you. Paddy gets to see his mother in a different and surprising light. We get closer to an underlying theme of maternal relations; how well do we know our mothers (in fact, any other human)?

Wilkins has the enviable ability to produce lines that endear themselves as keepsakes. Particular favourites include "the angry use themselves up faster than anyone" and "we don't memorise, we memoirise". You can follow the trail of the title, a line borrowed from an Elizabeth Bishop poem that aligns "somebody" with the person next to you rather than God, in order to dwell upon how we tend and are tended to.

You can search for metaphors along the communication channels that switch the preoccupations of an individual to a more universal story. Perhaps the most rewarding trail is to follow Paddy's attempt to decipher his mother in her estranged psychological state, her presences and her absences.

When, for example, he unexpectedly meets her in a supermarket, they search the trolley contents for clues of the other: "A great current of intimacy went between them through this simple, meaningless act of reaching into his trolley."

Wilkins' latest novel confirms his status as one of New Zealand's great writers; his words continue to refresh the page with a lightness of touch and a seriousness of intent.

He takes risks in how he allows a character to come to life in every nook and cranny of a narrative's making so that character becomes the foundation stone for story - complex, organic, contradictory, moving. I highly recommend it.

Somebody Loves Us All
by Damien Wilkins (VUP, $38)
Reviewed by Paula Green

Paula Green is an Auckland poet and children's writer.