Unravelling a tainted affair
A melancholy novel of all-consuming love haunts Paula Green.
Elspeth Sandys is an awardwinning fiction writer and playwright who has worked in film and television, written for the BBC and RNZ, and produced a captivating memoir. Her latest novel, Obsession, is a study of entangled human relations.
Three writers, three obsessions, a trail of unhappy lives. We meet Andrew on page one. He was a Poet Laureate who died in tragic and questionable circumstances and wrote the novel we are about to read. It feels like the novel is grafted on to his personal life.
The narrator resembles a witness-toevents at the start and thus creates a distancing effect, but the more we read, the more he is implicated in the story.
The narrator is obsessed with his friends Dick and Tessa and their carcrash existence. Dick is obsessed with writing New Zealand novels, remaining in the public spotlight and living in his house on Waiheke.
He is also obsessed with women, falling in love with women, and Tessa in particular. He is selfish, spontaneous and outrageously fickle. He falls in love with Tessa after a second and drags her back home from Melbourne.
Tessa is obsessed with Dick and endures his unwillingness to change anything about his life (think of those obsessions). She writes out of the spotlight, she tries to keep his unruly house in order, but she refuses to accept that she would be better off editing Dick’s work rather than writing her own.
I wondered about the degree to which Sandys’ experience of being married to Maurice Shadbolt shaped Tessa.
I also wondered how many stories like this belong to the wives of creative men who have secured public acclaim? Anne McCahon came to mind.
Sandys has crafted resonant characters whose foibles are loathsome but, at times, I felt at a distance. Perhaps I wanted to get inside Tessa’s head more, rather than visit courtesy of the narrator, because I was drawn to her complications, her submissions and her resistances.
To some degree the novel explores the way stories come into being, the way writers connect and disconnect, the way truth and imagination are crucial yet variable tools, the way personal experience is fertile yet dangerous ground.
The ending will catapult you back to the beginning, and cast the novel in a strange and melancholic light. Fascinating. Haunting.