KEY POINTS:
The idea of a love story about a 62-year-old man and a 22-year-old woman seems at best kind of yucky, at worst positively sordid.
It's testimony to South Island writer Laurence Fearnley's skill that her new novel Edwin & Matilda (Penguin, $28) is neither.
Fearnley's sixth novel is everything a good love story should be; thoughtful, moving and compassionate.
Edwin, a Dunedin photographer on the brink of retirement and Matilda, one of the brides he photographs, are damaged by the past and uncertain about the future. They come together on an unlikely quest to find Edwin's mother, who abandoned him as a child.
The idea for Edwin & Matilda began with a place Fearnley found fascinating.
"I live in Dunedin and my brother lives in Alexandra," she explains.
"There's a nice route between the two that takes you through Ranfurly where, on a barren hill, you can see all these buildings, which I found out were an old tuberculosis sanatorium.
"It was a really interesting community and quite a few people in Central Otago still remember it clearly as it was operating until the 1950s. It's now a religious retreat."
Fearnley knew she'd like to use the sanatorium as a story setting but the problem was she didn't want to write a historical drama. She also had other images floating about in her mind that were leading her towards an age-gap love story.
"A lot of my books start with images," she says.
"This time I was walking up to Franz Josef holding my five-year-old son's hand and everyone was very friendly, smiling and saying hello. I started to think about Edwin and Matilda holding hands and what the reaction would be."
For a while she struggled to write convincingly about such an enormous age gap.
"I kept thinking how on Earth can I have a 62-year-old and a 22-year-old? Why would they do it? Often I thought of dropping the idea but I kept coming back to it. I wanted it to seem so tender and loving that people don't notice the age difference."
The sanatorium ended up becoming the place Edwin spent his lonely childhood, and Fearnley takes her characters back there on the search for his missing mother.
Abandonment of a young child was another concept she admits to struggling with at first. "I spent ages thinking about it," she recalls.
Fearnley's own relationship with the landscapes of the South Island is evident in her writing.
She loves the area, setting Edwin & Matilda there despite the fact that it makes interest from overseas publishers unlikely. In fact, she feels so connected to the place she's setting her next novel there as well.
Fearnley's Southern Trilogy is only a trilogy in the loosest sense. Aside from the setting, all the novels have in common is love as the central theme. "Butler's Ringlet is about the search for love, Edwin & Matilda is about finding love and the next one will be about losing it," says Fearnley.
- Detours, HoS
