The instability of love
A fine debut collection of short stories, authentically low-key, yet no less potent.
Fiji. Kava, coups, cassava, potholed roads and tropical heat. Then Tibet, or New Zealand’s Fox Glacier. Blue glacial ice, snow bridges, crevasses. These two landscapes, these two climates, dominate this first collection of short stories by Auckland-based barrister-writer Gina Cole. Together they provide an unstable backdrop to love – found, lost, sometimes found again – and death: drownings, suicides, accidental shootings, vehicle crashes, earthquake.
Cole is of Fijian, Scottish and Welsh descent. This, her first book, grew out of a masters in creative writing at the University of Auckland – and it is a fine collection, touching on subjects of loss, addiction, infatuation, racism and family violence without once losing the subtleties of character or the momentum of story to the demands of her chosen themes.
In “Swim Bike Run”, a gruelling triathlon becomes the personal history of love, jealousy and – to avoid the spoiler – recent tragedy. In “Till”, a mathematician falls through a snow bridge to confront a preserved corpse, trapped in ice, presumably thousands of years before.
In “Grain Stacks”, the eradication of an entire row of houses for a new development follows the path of a young woman’s rejection of formal education and family violence. “Melt”, the least persuasive of the stories with its halting beginning, follows the transit of an ice sculpture through the humid streets of Auckland. More heat, more ice, but a believable convergence of island life and Western urbanity. This is Pasifika Auckland: afros, churches, mutable identities.
In “0.001”, an atmospheric physicist (more glaciers) in a student bar in Auckland evaluates Niki’s likelihood, following the loss of her lover, of finding her dream partner: dark-haired, green-eyed, gay, smart – the answer is in the title.
Spare, measured, deeply humane, Cole’s writing reveals an extraordinary restraint, embedding
Spare, measured, deeply humane, Cole’s writing reveals an extraordinary restraint.