Damien Wilkins
Te Herenga Waka University Press
Otago Daily Times, January 18th 2025
Damien Wilkin’s tenth novel is a multilayered portrait of a couple navigating the complexities of age and loss, both individually and collectively.
Mary and Peter (Pete) Brunton love their house, with its circular stairs, views of Kāpiti island, and ready access to the sea. It is also the place they found healing after a series of life-changing events, including the loss of their eleven-year-old son, Will. Now, with their 80s approaching and the infirmities of age increasingly evident, they have decided to move to a nearby retirement village, a transition freighted with intimations of mortality and loss. Pete is haunted by memories of his mother’s final years of delirium and paranoia. For Mary, it rekindles the grief surrounding the death of her sister, whom she often pairs with Will in her mind, as well as the abrupt termination of her career as a police officer, a triple loss that occurred within the space of twenty-four months.
Their emotional turmoil is intensified by two unexpected developments: a request for contact from the daughter of Shaun Anderson, the man they blame for Will’s death, and the discovery that Mary’s former boss, Chief Inspector Ross Hayes, is a village resident. And it quickly becomes evident that their ability to function as a self-sufficient unit – an adaptation that has served them well for many years – is a liability in the curated environment of the retirement village’ with its pretend streets and letterboxes, fanatically weeded flower beds and ‘voluntary’ schedule of trips and activities. As Mary puts it: “It was too late to make new friends, or too early. They had never needed them up to this point”. Maybe, they think, responding to Anderson’s daughter will allow them to settle into their new life. But escape, when it arrives, comes from a completely unexpected quarter.
In addition to its explorations of grief, loss and catharsis, the impact of expectations, particularly of the elderly, on identity is a central theme of the novel. Mary and Pete don’t consider themselves “old” old, but the fact that their decision to move surprises nobody makes them feel they are. The delirium into which Pete’s mother descends embodies a previously unarticulated inner life, a dramatic performance in which she is the star performer, in stark contrast to the correct, respectable wife and mother. And the Potemkin-like retirement community is more infantilising than autonomy-promoting, at least to those unwilling to buy into the illusion.
The narrative is dynamic, passed back and forth between Mary and Pete, past and present, with descriptions of the couple’s attempt to fit into a new community interspersed by passages of remembrance. Questions around Will’s death and the reasons for Mary’s departure from the police may be the gravitational centre of the plot, but it is the couple themselves and the relationship between them that forms its heart. Watching them navigate the challenges of age on their own terms and determine how they do – and do not– want to end their days was, for me, the novel’s highlight.