Water: review from New Zealand Books

... Each story in his collection is linked by the water allegory as different stages of the water cycle become simultaneously the prism and medium through which relationships unfold. There is little new in this watery world where everything is fluid and fragile, at best fleeting or illusory. As water changes its physical state, so the transformation of love echoes the momentum of this natural cycle. The narrative moves easily between teenage memories, the anatomy of a failed marriage, lives fractured by loss, and the contours of pain; at every level water intrudes.

In the opening story, an elderly man looks back on “a life spent swimming” and the trajectory of his marriage played out against the rhythms of the sea. From their first meeting during a midwinter swim race to their last, imaginary journey along the waterways of Europe, the ocean has proven this couple’s emotional compass. Sitting with his dying wife, he promises: “We will swim down the Seine wearing striped swimming trunks that stretch to our knees. From Paris, we will head out into the countryside, past the golden palace of Versailles, through Fountainbleau and Dijon.” It is proper, then, that he is at last drawn back to the sea, to a bay blooming with roses “rising and falling with the tide”, swimming so far out “he will not have the strength to go back, because he has been fooled by love”.

Mourning the death of a child that never was, a man derives succour from his view of water and a river’s flow — “like time passing” — in “River Story”. The passage of years finally allows grief and also forgiveness in the unblinking stare of his baby son. In “You Make A Life”, the vast stretches of the Tasman represent the distance that has corrupted the relationship between father and child, but simultaneously delivered love to an estranged son. For the couple in “The Sea As Past”, the many meanings of water again symbolise division; between an absent husband and father who recognises “the contents of history” in the ocean's murky depths, and a landlocked wife who has divined secrets “from the veins of her hands, faint mauve rivers under the web of her skin”.

This is a brave coilection that is characterised by a remarkable range and maturity.

- Rebecca J Davies, New Zealand Books.

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