The Deck

Fiona Farrell

Penguin Random House

Otago Daily Times, July 15th 2023

What, asks Fiona Farrell in the essay that frames her latest novel, is the point of fiction in a world “when reality eclipses it so conclusively…when the deliberate confusion of fact and fantasy is all-pervasive”? In answering this question she draws on her considerable talent as a writer to both show and tell, creating a hybrid work that, rather than blurring the lines between real and imagined, delineates them in a way that allows them to reinforce rather than cancel one another out.

Written over the 18 months between the end of the first Covid lockdown and the reopening of New Zealand to the world, The Deck is modelled on The Decameron. In Giovanni Boccaccio’s 14th-century classic, ten young Florentines shelter in the countryside outside the plague-ravaged city, amusing one another with music and stories. In The Deck, Philippa, a retired lawyer, and a small group of friends and family flee another, future plague. They gather at her remote, state-of-the-art crib, where they spend five days and nights eating, drinking, exploring the countryside, and relating events from the past in which “after divers misadventures, [one] at last attains a goal of unexpected felicity”.  A mixture of reminiscence, reinvention, and revelation, these stories are, by mutual and unspoken agreement, the best versions of themselves. But Farrell also makes us privy to the underlying stresses and sorrows that colour their relationships: the growing distance between Philippa and her husband, Tom. Her friend Ani’s grief for her own lost spouse. The troubled history between her sister Maria and almost everyone.

Despite their best efforts, the outside world continues to intrude, and when, on the sixth day, the group are forced to depart, they step out into the unknown and unknowable. But these few moments suffice to illustrate the importance of imagination as a respite, a resource allowing us to connect with the past and glimpse alternative future towards which we can, if we choose, turn our path.

Such nested story-telling is, of course, a tradition that stretches back to the Arabian Nights and beyond. What makes The Deck so memorable is the way Farrell situates it firmly within its factual and contextual context. The book opens with ‘The Frame’, in which the author sits before her typewriter planning her novel, wondering whether it is a pointless or even possible exercise, and questioning her ability to translate her ideas “from the crevices of my crumpled brain to the crevices of yours’” It closes with ‘The Author’s Conclusion’ in which she summarises the events that have taken place during its writing, the proliferation of ‘alternative facts’, and her uncertainty about the future.

In itsstructural and thematic mirroring of The Decameron, The Deck reminds us that what seems apocalyptic today is part of a centuries-old pattern. As it suggests, maybe the best we can hope for is “A life lived beneath sun and moon and stars in their customary alignment, as light as a bubble.” Herein lies the power of story.