Tense with circumstance, sudden accident, vivid recollection and occasional foreboding, Damien Wilkins’ new novel is a charged book. Ostensibly set in a time too often considered “the sunset years”, it captures in its blaze the entirety of human life.
Wilkins confronts the much-promoted glow of retirement and reveals some harder-edged truths, personal and general. The distinction between expectation and reality is telling. Delirious has suspense and pace.
Mary and Pete live in a large, two-storeyed house with a view of Kāpiti Island over the beach dunes. Both are in their late 70s and the future now looms in their thoughts. The expectations of others are clear: the couple will downsize and move into a retirement village.
But this is no ordinary novel. Although the tempo of life seems easy and pleasant, the past has a way of returning. Events seldom run to plan. Mary’s and Pete’s son died in an accident 40 years earlier, at the age of 11. A sudden call comes from the Wellington CIB with the possibility of new information.
Mary’s career serving the police force is also the story of a woman who entered a male world filled with incident. She has faced many mysteries of the human heart, including murder. Other things have remained indecipherable, including those involving her older sister, Claire.
Pete might seemingly have lived uneventfully as a librarian but his relationships with people have centred his existence. Wilkins describes Pete’s youthful love for his wife with tenderness, their marriage, the grief they had both shared concerning their son, and the odd incommunicative space in which they now live.
The blazing and fierce decline of Pete’s mother into dementia has also transformed her into a person with whom he has had no previous experience. Her free-flowing stream of sexual fantasies involving family members – or her own fictitious life as a Nazi in hiding after World War II – are startling.
This is the 15th book from Wilkins, who has won the New Zealand Book Award for fiction and is a creative writing professor at Te Herenga Waka – Victoria University of Wellington. It amply demonstrates his skills of renewal. Delirious is an accurate and sympathetic study of change, age and growth. Lessons are not far below the surface.
Life has many possible rites of passage: the first day of school, lost virginity, marriage and the birth of children. There are also other events that are not expected – and these are the foundations of the novel. They detonate in slow motion. Every occurrence, it seems, has an inevitable consequence, sometimes coming years later. By flicking back and forward chronologically, Wilkins ably demonstrates this truth. Mary and Peter must deal with new and changing circumstances, but also examine the foundations of their own world.
The landscape of the Kāpiti Coast becomes archetypal, the setting for eternal situations. “The island didn’t move,” Wilkins writes, “but everything else did.” This environment is evoked with care and precision: the coastal dunes with their native pīngao and muehlenbeckia, or exotic spinifex and marram. The surroundings of retirement villages – artificial grass bowling greens and Greco-Roman pillars in marble atriums with ATM machines – receive a similar scrutiny.
One function of literature is to communicate experience, and Delirious is closely observed. Set on the very edge of land, the novel is poised between rational assessment and the mysteries of the deep. It’s not a psychological thriller, rather a writer’s revelation of human nature in the unfolding setting of time. Emotions are frequently stark, the surprises constant. Just as in life, there are always other questions.
Delirious continues its narrative twisting until the final satisfaction of the last cunning swivel. In our ends, Wilkins indicates, there are also beginnings.
Delirious, by Damien Wilkins (Te Herenga Waka University Press, $38), is out now.
