You can't go home again, and stay
Isabel Quigley
PROUD GARMENTS by Barbara Anderson Cape, £14.99, pp. 224 The guest who won't shut up. The guest who takes over, won't leave, has too strong a presence, fills the house. Bianca Lefarge is all of these, and penniless with it. So she can't leave her sister Rosa's house and any- way Rosa is too kind to turn her out. After 30 years in England the widowed Bianca, cultivated, maddening, has gone back to New Zealand where now, with the blind, slap-happy talent of the self-absorbed, she is driving her brother-in-law Henry mad. Poor Rosa, strung between Henry and Bianca. Poor Bianca, too; and poor Henry. Barbara Anderson's gift is for sharp sympa- thy.
That's the start of Proud Garments. Enter, then, Henry and Rosa's son Rufus (Roof to his girlfriend Gaby), a dodgy entrepreneur. He and his aunt Bianca decide to make money together, but they reckon without Gaby, a snake that makes the rest of the world seem innocent. She it is who makes the weak wicked and the greedy, criminal. A more evil character it would be hard to find than this shaven-headed, glittering creature adored by Roof. All ends horribly, though in for- giveness.
From start to finish Barbara Anderson is a surprise, or a series of surprises, all unalike. Recognisable, chatty, all slang and physical energy, her people jump off the page. Occasionally they even jump into the narrative, becoming first-person narrators for a few lines, which is odd but acceptable when everything is shown from several angles. And the reader is right there among them, part of small-town New Zealand life, involved, belonging, mesmerised. Will blackmail work? Will title deeds be trans- ferred? Will Gaby get her way or her comeuppance? The tale of family warfare and half-loving hatreds is not just credible but absorbing.
So long as it stays in its place, in New Zealand. When the action is transferred to Europe, and figures and atmosphere and landscape are less viscerally familiar to their conjuror, the immediacy is blurred, the intensity slackens. But at home she is a conjuror of such skill that one is constantly startled. Partly it is a case of originality of style and expression, through which everything is weirdly recognisable. Partly the way in which dialogue becomes a part of that same everything, and the accent itself, the tone of voice, makes for present-dayness, for smell and colour and a sort of comic- strip funniness. Partly it is the way time and place are played with and pulled about, fantasy and reality seen subjectively, in each person's mind and feeling and senses. And partly, or perhaps mainly, it is what Barbara Anderson in a throwaway moment calls 'the endless quivering of life'.
For the book quivers, it does indeed. Without false emphases or pretentious imagery the sense of reality is heightened, one's perception of things quickened, one's imagination stretched. Each person, each moment, each scene, has its reality in the person experiencing it. Nothing is seen objectively. Everything varies from moment to moment. The air shimmers above the garden tap. Bianca counts the hairs in Henry's nostrils. Gaby is ludicrous or enticing, depending on who is watching her. New Zealanders who return from Europe are exiles forever, never at ease, nostalgic for a past that has vanished in both places. Detail and the overall scene combine, narrators intermingle. This is complex, fantastical writing with a leaven of reality. In the mind and on the page, subjectively and straight-up-and-down, for all its shifts of mood, tense, outlook and atmosphere, it makes a whole, it works.
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