Fiona Kidman: Songs From The Violet Cafe

Reviewed by ELSPETH SANDYS

Fiona Kidman is a novelist writing at the peak of her powers. With a formidable body of work behind her, Songs from the Violet Cafe stands out as a novel of consummate skill, weaving together the stories of a diverse group of young people who spend the summer of 1963 working at the Violet Cafe in Rotorua.

The novel opens marvellously with a depiction of a boat being set alight on the milky waters of Lake Rotorua. At once echoes are set up in the reader's mind: the burning boat carries items people have discarded as no longer of use or value in their lives. This then is a ritual burning, akin to the funeral rites of other, distant cultures. Any doubt that this is a novel with a wider purpose than just the resurrection of this country's recent past is immediately dispelled. New Zealand provides the starting and finishing points for Songs from the Violet Cafe, but the story's range is such that it is not a place that stands at the centre of this intricate and haunting tale, but the themes Kidman so expertly teases out of her material.

Echoes, both within the text and outside it, are an integral part of the structure of the novel. A part-Asian child is carried across Lake Rotorua by a woman who may or may not be his mother. This scene, which takes place 60 years before the boat-burning, follows it in the text. No explanation for this juxtaposition is given. The reader has to wait for this, as indeed for all the mysteries set up in the course of the novel, to be explained. But the scene will have its echo 40 years later, when a part-Asian child is carried across the dangerous waters of Tonle Sap Lake in northern Cambodia by a woman who will become, in every sense that matters, the child's mother.

The ease with which Kidman weaves together the different characters and locations of her story would be sufficient to set this novel apart, but it is in her depiction of the larger shadows hanging over her characters' lives that the novel's real brilliance lies.

Jessie Sandle, the "main" character (though others seem almost as important) leaves the Violet Cafe on the night of the tragedy that will change all their lives. She travels first to England then, as a war correspondent, to China, Vietnam and Cambodia. The parallel with Robyn Hyde, whose ghost has already been summoned, in a reference Jessie's mother makes to her schoolfriend - a journalist who travelled to China and died tragically - is clear. No name is mentioned, but the echo persists. Jessie, in some mysterious, redemptive way, seems to be reclaiming Robyn Hyde's life, just as other characters, less dramatically, can be seen as reclaiming the lives of their parents and grandparents.

Jessie is not the only refugee from the Violet Cafe to find herself, 20 years later, in Cambodia. Two other key players from the 1963 Rotorua drama land up in Phnom Penh. In this way Kidman is able to portray exotic locations and large world events, not in isolation from her characters, but as an integral part of their personal stories.

If occasionally I had to go back in the text to check on a character whose role thus far had been minimal, that was only because this is a story the reader has to work at. Not explaining, not providing easy narrative links, are what separates out this novel from others of more pedestrian construction. Kidman trusts the reader to stay with her story, to respond to the vividness of her descriptions, to believe in the several mysteries she has created and sets out to solve.

My one quibble is with some, though not all, of the male characters. I had difficulty believing in Lou Messenger, catalyst for so much that happens at the Violet Cafe. And the Chinese-European, John Wing Lee, didn't ring true for me at all.

But these are minor criticisms. The novel sweeps across half a century and travels round the world and back again. It is a work of vision and maturity that tells a compelling story with a lightness of touch and a delight in the sensuous things of life - food, clothes, sex - that help the reader to assimilate its larger, more sombre purpose.

"Morality," Jessie Sandle concludes towards the end of the novel, "could not be defined in any tangible way unless someone took a stand, and said, 'This is what I believe and this is what I will do'."

If there is a message in this novel it is that. Jessie, like Hugo, the most successful of the male characters in the book, makes a stand and changes her life, and the lives of others around her. "Only connect," E.M. Forster's famous invocation, would be a fitting apostrophe for Songs from the Violet Cafe, for it is, above all, about the mystery of connection.

Vintage, $26.95

* Elspeth Sandys is an Auckland writer.