Douglas Lloyd Jenkins' book Shelter offers a double-barrelled romance

Douglas Lloyd Jenkins. Photo / Supplied

"I have got on," Douglas Lloyd Jenkins comments wryly about his life after the death of his husband, Peter Wells, the well-known writer and film-maker, which occurred exactly three years ago in February 2019. "I kind of thought I would live my life in seclusion – but the truth of the fact is that I met someone with what other people consider undue haste … I am having a nice but different life …"

Wells had been one of New Zealand's most awarded novelists and a noted non-fiction author. The pair had been partners for 28 years, marrying in Napier a bare few months before Wells' death. Lloyd Jenkins himself is a prize-winning writer on design, art, and social history, and his books notably include At Home: A Century of New Zealand Design. Now Lloyd Jenkins has just released his own first work of fiction.

Shelter is an unabashed account of one man's passionate regard for his city as well as being the story of a relationship as it changes over a decade. Lloyd Jenkins' Auckland is an urban area with too few lovers, but he also broadens the question – do New Zealanders themselves even know how to love?

"I don't shy away from the fact that Shelter is a romance and a love story," Lloyd Jenkins says, "but it's double-barrelled romance – there are the romantic entanglements of the male characters as they look for love, but in the background there's also a city looking for the same thing.

"New Zealand fiction still appears to have its heart in the hinterland and – if it ventures into the urban space – it's 'anywhere but Auckland'. I wanted to write a novel that allows readers to fall in love with Auckland, that gives them permission to love the urban environment. If Auckland is to grow as a city, we, as residents, need to find ways to love it – that is, Auckland needs to be consciously romanticised. This is where fiction can play a significant role in opening our eyes to the uniqueness of place."

Shelter begins in 1994 with a handsome 21-year-old builder, Joe Wright, meeting Leo, a fellow worker on a building site after an odd encounter stalled, one in front of the other, in their cars in one of Auckland's peak-hour motorway snarl-ups. When they finally come face-to-face, Joe is hit by a compound emotion made up of much more than pure desire. The enigmatic Leo also knows things (and he is happy to share them with Joe) – architecture, history, music and literature. The two begin an affair.

Leo's passion for Auckland's old buildings leads to some of the most haunting passages in Shelter as the pair wander the city's night-time mid-1990s streets, filled with Edwardian buildings prior to their demolition.

"I personally believe that most first novels tend to be autobiographical and in this one you have got autobiographical elements," Lloyd Jenkins says. "I moved into the central city to Mount St in 1981, and I can remember a very different city. I wanted to think about what was left from that city and put some of those fragments on the page.

"One of the reasons I chose Emily Place, for instance, was as a place that is somewhere you can go and reimagine what the city was like. And I contrast that with Hobson St, of which there is nothing left … I feel quite lucky as an Aucklander to have experienced the city before we did terrible things to it.

"I got to the point where I have a lot of stuff in my brain and the books I want to write in non-fiction, publishers aren't interested in, and the books the publishers want me to write, I'm not

interested in... And maybe a romanticised emotional connection to the city in a novel might be a stronger heritage platform than a non-fictional history has ever been."

But, in Shelter, Leo suddenly announces that he can no longer stay in the relationship with Joe, and disappears. While emotionally devastated and helped by new friends he has largely met through Leo, Joe begins the first steps of creating his own property development company. Lloyd Jenkins describes the making of a man and, gradually, the creation of a substantial business. When the novel's second part begins in 2004, Joe has become a well-known Auckland developer with his own outwardly successful life. Then Leo appears again …

So, is Shelter a "gay novel" or is it something different?

"These days most people know someone who is gay and it is less than six degrees of separation and you are not writing about a foreign species, you are writing about someone people might know – and that is what the book is about," Lloyd Jenkins says.

"I wanted to write about the complexity and context of our lives – the context of our lives outside the LGBTQI+ community. We have been fighting for integration for 40 years and we are integrated now so let's write about that integration."

The novel was conceived and its first versions were written not long before Wells' death after his prostate cancer metastasised and he was focused on getting his own final book, Hello, Darkness, through to publication.

"Peter read a very early draft, so the book has been developed in the period since. He said to me that I had made an amazing number of mistakes, ones that all first novelists make," Lloyd Jenkins laughs, "which was his way of saying he was quite proud of me."

Shelter by Douglas Lloyd Jenkins (Bateman Books, $35) is out now.