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Emily Stuart is a writer patching her various writing jobs together to make a living in London.  Evan Gordonston is her childhood friend whose family ended up living in the States. When Evan moves back to London, a friend of Emily’s suggests lodging for Evan, he meets his new landlady. And – BANG!

Evan ask Emily to help him document his life-changing meeting with Caroline Beresford.  Emily undertakes the task of documenting his unstated and unrequited love, but his is not the only case of ‘courtly love’.  We recognise in Emily’s writing of Evan’s enrapture, his deteriorating physical state, his screwing up at work and his diet of increasingly sophisticated G&Ts, the same progression in Emily herself.

Caroline’s Bikini is a piece of metafiction, with Emily describing to us the processes and frustrations of writing the novel we are reading.  Emily/Gunn provides us with plenty of footnotes pointing us to the copious end notes – or not, as we please.  The flow of the writing is engrossing, very sad and very funny, and the footnotes deteriorate along with Emily’s judgement as the seasons pass, as the pubs get swankier, as the gin gets more expensive and more chichi, as the pair get more bogged down in describing something about which Emily is in complete denial.

And not only are the reader’s concerns with Emily and Evan – there’s Caroline, the ‘ideal’ woman: good fun, beautiful, hosting successful parties, whisking up meals for her three sons – but also depressed, medicating and not often seen without a glass of wine in her hand.  And David Beresford – having walked away from his job to follow his passion of the classics he is leaving his family adrift in the process. And there are Emily’s friends and colleagues, distantly trying to re-engage with her.

Caroline’s Bikini builds a fair amount of tension, given that not much happens apart from a lot of gin being drunk.  As we slowly move towards the resolution, prefigured in the beginning and achingly drawn out at the end, the reader has no idea whether they are reading a tragedy or a comedy. Whatever the outcome (read Caroline’s Bikini to find out which it is), the novel is an excellent depiction of when personal concerns take over your life and stop you seeing, or taking part in, the world around you.  Wonderful!

Peter Collie is mourning the death of his wife Moira.  In this fragile state he discovers that he was ignorant of much of Moira’s past, and even of her recent life.  The tense relationship with his son Aaron, Moira’s biological son that he has fathered since birth, is almost at breaking point.  And he makes some very bad decisions that threaten his career as a lawyer in a prestigious Wellington law firm.

Duignan’s depiction of Peter is deft and thoroughly believable.  He makes terrible decisions, doesn’t ask pertinent questions, and doesn’t give up important bits of information … i.e. he is completely human – he is dogged by “the problem of hope”.  Peter’s story is framed both by a romantic purchase of his youth: a copy of Chagall’s lithographs of Daphnis and Chloe, and the story of Chagall’s flight from occupied France.  Placing Peter’s, and everyone’s life, in the hands of the fates – especially as the book is set at the time of the Twin Towers and its aftermath.

Shortly after Moira’s funeral, Aaron returns to his actor’s life in London, but once back in London he disappears.  Peter is frantic about his son, whilst trying to re-engage with his job, deal with an arch mother-in-law, Claudia, and his ailing parents in Wanganui (the book uses the spelling of the time).  He also decides to sell their Castlepoint holiday home, and suddenly is facing the prospect of his long-deceased daughter from an earlier relationship still being alive – as he says “I am not at my best these days, I’m simply not at my best”.

It would be so easy to make a mess of this book, with so many complex storylines, but The new ships is elegantly structured and you never feel lost.  Through the book we are asked to consider the role of political protest, the choices that at the time feel the right ones to protect those we love, but in retrospect might be seen as desertions, and the private feelings of resentment one can feel towards those close to you – spouses, parents, children.

I don’t really want to say much about what happens in the book, it is full of the gently unexpected.  Peter’s grief is palpable “bawling my eyes out in the car on a side street in Berhampore.”  He is reduced by events: Captured in a discovered painting, finding out one of his brightest work protégés has suffered a career-ending injury, even finding his real estate has shrunk.  And realising that he thought one of the most commendable thing about his and Moira’s marriage was that each could draw a “veil over what each of us held private.”

But there are also affirmations: his love for Aaron, his tenderness towards his parents, his efforts to ‘do the right thing’ over the years.  Peter’s voice is male, compared at times to Orpheus, who travelled to the underworld in an attempt to retrieve his wife, but who was also eventually pulled apart by women, women who are “pulling things apart simply in order to get some relief from ceaselessly having to keep their households together.”  Once Moira and Geneviève (his previous major relationship) are dead, Peter is free to consider what his relationships might have meant, and how he might have hurt the women he loved, earlier on with his casual infidelity, and later with his money and privilege.

The book moves around in time (from the 1970s to 2002) and place: houseboats in Amsterdam, cold flats in London, India and Pakistan on the other end of the phone, Venice hotels, Mytilene on Lesbos, various North Island locations.  The world is always in conflict, people keep secrets, they lie, struggle, fall in love, and try and work out their place in the world – and how much control they have over that.  At one point The new ships nicely counters the fatalistic view of life with a recalling of Plato’s suggestion of the transmigration of souls – a type of Karmic justice.  But Peter wants none of it: “Just give me the implacable, impersonal Fates, measuring out the thread and making their arbitrary cut.”

I think The new ships is saying we can try and determine our lives but in the end we are defined by those around us: our family, friends and even our casual acquaintances.  A lovely book.

“All this sweet hope lost. Lost to time, to dust, to heat. Like the dinosaurs’ hopes, like the fish that left the sea, like the fish that stayed in the sea knew they wouldn’t see one another again” – but can hope be regained?  Is there somewhere we can start again?

The new animals follows a group of people who work for an Auckland cutting edge fashion house through the day and night prior to an unscheduled photoshoot.  The company is the creation of three young males, Kurt, Cal and Tommy, who represent “the new sincere, the anti-irony” generation who respect their parents, and who live online where they believe they are “part of the global conversation.”

Carla and Sharona are the previous generation – they are ‘old’ – in their 40s – one a contract hairdresser and the other the woman who creates the fashions.  The young men treat them like shit, complaining that they “would bitch and moan about the way they ran things and where did they go to get paid?”  When Kurt talked to women he “sounded like he was talking to a small child he was trying to coax down from a tree”.  And Tommy “wasn’t talking to Sharona, he was talking to everyone else in the room, well, all the people who had penises”.

Carla on the outside is “polite and engaged” but inside she is an insecure wreck.  She escaped for a few years and now she is back and “didn’t want to look naggy. That was the worst thing a woman could look, especially an old woman”.  All the women are on edge, and Sharona momentarily tips over when Cal “wanted to cut the hem off the T-shirt … he doesn’t even know you can’t leave an unfinished edge on a weft-cut knit.”

Carla has a friend Duey, the only calm one, and the only one not sure about young make-up artist, Elodie: “Duey wasn’t sure she could be relied on as much as everyone thought. Young women were strange.”  All the others are in Elodie’s thrall, in awe of her youth, and don’t realise she is using them to get information – information about where Carla had been when she escaped for all those years …

This is where we realise The new animals isn’t about the fashion industry at all: “everyone thought what they were doing was making the difference, when really, when everything went to shit, it became clear it was just money. You really couldn’t do anything wrong when there was a lot of money around.”  If you have money you have a chance, if not you are a victim, a victim to bosses, to climate change, to homelessness.

Fashion is a metaphor for the disposable society, those things we reject when they go out of style, not when they wear out.  And for the money gap: “There were people sleeping in the street … The bright, bright shops keeping the merchandise warm and the people outside them under cardboard and newspaper.”  Shoes are $1000 shoes, a necklace is a $4000 necklace.  I also really, really had to read the descriptions of Carla’s dog Doug as though they were symbolic of all “the intense boredom mixed with nerve-electrifying stress” wrapped up in an aggressive, frustrated, potential killer bundle of muscle.  The alternative was too awful.

Clear headed Duey knows “The world was ending … It wasn’t just cynicism, or because she was old. It felt like the end. They’d all be underwater, soon enough. There was nothing anyone could do about it.”  And all through the novel the sea is leaking in: “The fountain at Mission Bay was going, the water, the water, the water. Carla looked away from it and down at her phone. In Duey’s periphery it looked like she was diving into the sea.”

Elodie is young, unknowable, estranged from her politician father who thinks whatever the world’s problems “someone will find a way to tidy it up.’  And Elodie wants to escape the way she thinks Carla did: Carla who came back: “Cold, wet, naked. Quietly, without any attention, and she’d fit back in again, eyes fucked, skin awful, bung feet. She’d come back, washed away the salt, got dressed, and fallen back in line” – but Elodie won’t make the mistake of returning.

Elodie gets what she wants by being nice, appearing optimistic and being young.  And she heads for the sea, believing in nothing but “fate and natural selection”.  But after Carla, Sharona and Duey’s rebelliousness, and Kurt, Cal and Tommy’s vacuous outlook, does Elodie’s vision reach beyond the journey away?   We love and fear the ocean as we love and fear our origins, the cold of the sea takes our thoughts away, but our curse on the land is taking over the sea.  No, poor Elodie is as lost as all the others, and her destination, as we guess where that is towards the end, is the real-world horror we have conjured up by our rituals of excess.

Can hope be regained?  Is there somewhere we can start again?  Probably not, we just do whatever small thing we can and read amazing books like The new animals!

Sita is on a zero-hours cleaning contract and is the only wage earner in her family.  Her husband, Thiru, is currently only able to contribute a Work and Income benefit, and her son, Satish, is still at school. So, when her boss demands she turn up for work in Wellington, despite a cyclone, road closures and no public transport, she leaves Naenae and heads South.

Sita is an Everyman on a journey, talking to those she encounters on the way.  Sita is a Sri Lankan refugee who finds the speed and slang of Kiwi English a mystery and she feels herself a “village bumpkin who didn’t know how New Zealand operated”.  At one stage in her journey Sita circles back to Naenae; another member of the Sri Lankan community picks her up and drops her back home – Sita is too embarrassed to explain her predicament. Financial and racial snobbery is alive and well within the community as well as outside of it.  Sita has dark skin – you wouldn’t see her in the dark unless she smiled quips a co-worker – Sita doesn’t understand.  And Sita feels inferior to those Sri Lankans who arrived as immigrants as opposed to refugees and who have made comfortable lives.

Sita is frail and in chronic pain from injuries she sustained in the Sri Lankan civil war: “There was so much that made her feel like she was a dandelion seed floating in the wind, waiting for someone else to rip it apart to make a wish”.  But somewhere inside Sita is a tough core, and she is determined to make a good life for Satish, and to make up for his early experiences in Sri Lanka, for which she feels responsible.  She is calm in the face of those things she can do nothing to stop, unlike Thiru who is petrified by his helplessness.  Sita repeats things to herself to keep herself on track, and to keep her memories at bay.  Memories that force their way through sometimes, and when she is alone and walking in the dark they rush over her like a torrent.

The water of the cyclone that soaks Sita as she travels is just one source of cold, wet and fear.  The swollen rivers she passes menace her as well, with their threat of bursting their banks and engulfing her – at one stage the water is described as having “paws.”  But the people she spends time with on her quest provide warmth, they are also on the periphery of society – those who aren’t don’t register her, or only enough to hurl abuse at her out their car windows.  Sita’s fellow travelers know nothing of Sri Lanka apart from cricket, they know nothing of the horrors of the war.  But they know what it is to be marginalised and financially powerless: the kid who can’t get a break from the Police, the homeless men, the prostitute, the transgender woman, the man just out of prison, the Māori mechanic who is used to casual racism – they are all in one way or another disenfranchised and poor.

Sita feels she should be grateful that New Zealand allowed her and Satish in to be reunited with Thiru, but she also knows that those in power don’t “give a shit” about her.  One homeless man offers her advice: “Don’t ever let them make you feel grateful” – but then he comments he is living on the streets and advises she might not want to take his advice.  Sodden downstream is a wonderfully moving portrait of an individual, a great description of what it might be like to be a refugee in a country whose language and rules are a mystery, and a really really good read.