Dunedin novelist Laurence Fearnley is best known for writing atmospheric novels with deep roots in the natural world. At The Grand Glacier Hotel is the latest in the author’s series responding to the five senses – Scented for smell, Winter Time for touch – this time being focused on sound, what can be heard and what cannot.
Libby and Curtis have been married for 25 years when they embark on a much-needed holiday. Libby is recovering from cancer, a vicious sarcoma, and the treatment has left her scarred emotionally and physically. New Zealand’s borders are still closed due to Covid so the couple depart Dunedin and head for the West Coast. They plan to stay at the eponymous Grand Glacier Hotel, spending a week relaxing and recalibrating. They’d visited the region 20 years before when their daughter was just a toddler, that trip being somewhat marred by baby Hannah vomiting all through their rented campervan in the midst of a sodden winter. Ever since, they’ve been intending to return without the drama.
Pitching up at the historic hotel, Libby and Curtis encounter a disparate collection of guests and staff. Kendrick, the eccentric tweed-coated owner of the hotel. Ella, who works for the Reserve Bank and is always at her laptop, banging out fan fiction based on female characters from old Western movies. A tour group united by their love of Esperanto, as well as a slew of outdoorsy types keen to view the glacier before it disappears. Then there is James, who has come down from his remote campsite where he has been searching for the elusive South Island kōkako, a bird most believe to be extinct.
The coast is the perfect place for Libby and Curtis to recuperate and reconnect, but their plan hits a hurdle when Curtis leaves his reading spectacles at a cafe in Wānaka. He decides to drive back to retrieve them as he can’t keep up with work without them. Expecting to make the seven-hour round trip in a single day, his plan is thwarted when a storm closes the main road in and out.
All alone at the hotel, Libby is consumed by her brutal brush with cancer. Virtually every move she makes is experienced through the prism of the pain that radiates from her left leg where the sizeable tumour was removed. Still relatively incapacitated, her damaged limb makes her a liability when she attempts even the shortest walks. “I still felt it. Disability as a form of loneliness that extended far beyond self-pity. A sadness that was manageable when alone, removed from the world, but unbearably painful when faced with happy, able-bodied people, moving around at ease. It wasn’t loss. It was loneliness.” Sensing her vulnerability in the great outdoors, kōkako hunter James takes her under his wing and the unlikely pair, both harbouring secrets and scars, find themselves on an unexpected quest. With the road remaining closed, they seek to unravel the riddle someone has set for them, and in doing so, they open up to each other.
The novel is classic Fearnley; the writing is evocative, the landscape a character in its own right. There’s a subtextual rumination on the damage humans have wrought on the Earth, a eulogy for things that have been lost that can never be re-found, from precious native species to glaciers as well as Libby’s health.
In spite of it being a response to sound, this is a quiet book. Never maudlin or sentimental, The Grand Glacier Hotel is a thoughtful, slow-moving exploration of what it is to face one’s own mortality. Yet, for all the sadness inherent in Libby’s life and the world, there is a thread of hope, a reminder to be grateful for the things that remain.
At The Grand Glacier Hotel by Laurence Fearnley (Penguin, $37) is out now.
