All shook up
The tense, moving portrait of a modern family.
The Hope fault is real – a strikeslip fault that runs from the Southern Alps to just north of Kaikoura. It’s also the metaphor at the heart of Tracy Farr’s quietly brilliant second novel, which captures how the ground beneath even close families is ever-shifting
and threatening divisive rifts.
The book is in three parts. The first and last take place at a holiday home owned by Iris and her ex-husband, Paul. The house has been sold and the family’s arrived to help pack up: Iris, Paul and their 21-year-old son, Kurt; Paul’s younger second wife, Kristin, and their new baby; plus 15-year-old Luce and her mother, Marti, who is Paul’s twin sister and Iris’ best friend.
In modern relationship parlance, it’s complicated, and a set-up that seems to promise quarrels, longheld grudges and thrown
crockery. But Farr subverts that expectation. Occasional niggles aside, this family gets on. Past hurts have been forgiven and new members welcomed. Personality quirks are fondly tolerated, differences accepted. Love and togetherness have been chosen over division.
So, instead of high drama, what we get is an almost forensic investigation of intimacy; of how people who care for each other find ways to accommodate preferences, navigate trouble spots and express their affection. We discover how they deal with their own doubts and worries, how they reconcile gaps between their expectations and reality.
It’s mostly rendered in domestic scale – cups of tea, stitches on a blanket, games of paper, scissors, rock. That could be dull, except we are keenly aware that every action, word and thought is a potential trigger for the ever-present fault that lies beneath. One misspoken word could open up the abyss.
With ingeniously sustained tension, Farr ensures we never become complacent.
She heightens the suspense by snapping the house-party story in two, inserting between them another tale that shakes up both time and our understanding of what’s gone before. It’s a risky device, but Farr pulls it off, and we leap back into Iris, Kurt and Luce’s lives, looking at them through a revelatory new lens, unsure but hoping that their story will end well.
This is an accomplished, immersive, moving book. Highly recommended. THE HOPE FAULT, by Tracy Farr ($37, Fremantle Press)