"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."