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Devonport writer Kevin Ireland turned 75 on July 18. He celebrated in style with a five-hour lunch with friends, then slept like a baby and awoke the next morning feeling great. Today, he has reasons to feel more sunny again after reeling over the sudden death of his wife Caroline last November. He and Caroline, who had been together for 40 years, had moved to a smaller, more modern house in Devonport, while their son and his family moved into their old villa around the corner. "We thought we'd better downsize," he says, "but I didn't know we'd be downsizing quite so much".
After the shock of Caroline's death, from a brain aneurism, Ireland is bouncing back. He has just returned from a 10-day trip to Florence, where he gave a keynote address at the conference of the NZ Studies Association in conjunction with the Centre for NZ Studies at Birkbeck, University of London. The conference is a jolly affair where academics and writers from around the world gather to discuss urgent matters such as "Italy in the Maori Imaginary: the Novels of Witi Ihimaera" and "Odysseus in the Land of Kupe".
Ireland's speech was more simply titled, "Coming to terms with the Med".
Among the many pleasures of the trip, he says, was his accommodation at an old mansion on the outskirts of Florence - within walking distance of the city, and "slightly longer to walk back because one has eaten and had a bottle of wine". He enjoyed a "wonderful mass" at Fiesole on All Saints Day, and joined a "totally moving" tour, led by Dr Chris Pugsley, of the World War II battlefield of San Michele followed by a wine-tasting at a local vineyard.
All rather pleasant and indulgent, in complete contrast to the world painted by Ireland in his latest novel, The Jigsaw Chronicles. In it, he depicts a routine-driven, insular lawyer called Brook, who lives alone and is accustomed to the good things in life, down to the best coffee.
He takes it all for granted but Brook doesn't realise this ordered contemporary existence is all veneer, easily lost. One day, as he walks into an early morning mist, his world disappears and he enters another human existence, a ghastly fascist state where extreme poverty and fear rule, and life has no worth. Oddly, Brook is now a man called Johnny, whose memory has been erased. As the plot develops, it appears that Johnny, with his lover Jayne, is a force for freedom. In the early stages, at least, he still has the ability to return to the world of Brook. One day, he may not want to ...
This is a wild new direction for Ireland - best known for his poetry and memoirs, along with five previous works of fiction - and he even goes so far as to describe The Jigsaw Chronicles as "science fiction". However, when you start to think of Brook's free world in terms of a democracy, and Johnny's world in the context of brutal communist states like Bulgaria, the scenario starts to make complete sense. But it took Ireland 10 years to resolve the issue of how to traverse the two parallel scenarios.
"It's the longest book it's ever taken me to write," he explains over a coffee outside a Devonport cafe. "I have written several versions of it. It's a change from being a mere work of the imagination, which all fiction is, to being a work I had to categorise as science fiction in the end. I came clean.
"I don't read science fiction at all but I am always fascinated by its possibilities. Books about alien planets and civilisations are really just fairy stories told in an even stranger than usual setting and they don't interest me much. They are costume dramas. But works of writers like Arthur C. Clarke, Ray Bradbury, they are works that stretch the limits, not of science but of fiction, and I tried to follow their example."
Ireland says living in Bulgaria in 1959-60 provided him with plenty of material for Johnny's world. "The experience has never left me. There was a close inter-dependence of people and I got taken at face value and entrusted with lives. Those people could have been locked up for ever. Hard labour in a Bulgarian prison was excessively hard labour. People who survived it went through appalling suffering. But people helped each other in unimaginable ways so there was something positive there."
When Ireland had finally completed the last rewrite, The Jigsaw Chronicles was set for publication by Hazard Press - which went bankrupt just as publisher Quenton Wilson "was on the verge of pressing the button to print the book".
Ireland's friend, Auckland publisher Christine Cole Catley, came to the rescue, also printing a book of poetry called How To Survive the Morning, both of which were launched last week. The title, says Ireland, is a pun, a musing on life after the death of a loved one. "I am surviving, with friends, the children and Sydney [his beloved little dog]. A dog gives you routine. I worked very hard on the poems - I wanted to get right up to date with Caroline's death and to draw a line."
The second to last poem - the eponymous piece - encapsulates Ireland's pensive frame of mind as a man living alone, finding things to do each day as "those you love melt away". There's reading, gardening, visitors, going out, the hour to walk the dog, a biscuit, a glass of wine. The last lines are, "Orderliness has come to your rescue. You have got through a whole day".
The last poem, The Place of Rest, is for Caroline, "resting all day in the spread of a pohutukawa tree".
"There is nothing new to say about death," says Ireland. "You accept the old things about love and friendship but there is nothing new to say, just your little bit to add. The last thing Caroline would have ever wanted was for anyone to be morbid. When we met she was a party girl and she went out to a great party."
He laughs. "There was no funeral, no corpse, no box. A few reminiscences then shut the thing up so people wouldn't warble on for ever. We had talked it over just a couple of months before. We'd been to a funeral and we decided we had better decide what we were going to do as there were good things and bad things about it. I didn't like seeing the cadaver in the coffin. It wasn't like the person. I like to remember old friends as they will always be."
* The Jigsaw Chronicles and How To Survive the Morning
(Cape Catley Ltd, $27.99 and $23.99).
