NZ writer Carl Nixon.
He's a contender, Carl Nixon. He's an acclaimed playwright, has won significant awards for his short stories and he's come close with his novels, too. His previous novels, Rocking Horse Road and Settlers' Creek, were long-listed for the prestigious IMPAC Dublin Literary Awards.
Nixon's writing has hitherto been a trifle
old-fashioned, in that his stock-in-trade has been straightforward realism, unperturbed by most of the literary fashions of the last three decades. But in his latest, The Virgin And The Whale, he tries on something new for size.
At the heart of it, The Virgin And The Whale is all about the power and importance of story. The reader is alerted to the author's intention to explore the role of the creation of identity by three epigrams to the text. And the novel itself features a story within a story within the story.
The novel purports to be based upon a real story told to Nixon by an admirer of his fiction. That story is of a young man who has returned from the trenches of World War I with a major brain injury, sustained when the femur of a comrade torn apart in the burst of a shell penetrates his skull. Although he is physically healed and has his full faculties, Paul Blackwell has no memory of anything that happened before he regained consciousness half-buried in mud and blood in the wrecked trench. From his perspective, he was quite literally born into war; the only identity he acknowledges is the name bestowed upon him by his rescuers and his medical attendants: Lucky.
His wife, of course, wants her husband back, but her attempts to jog his memory are met with outright hostility.
