Wendy Parkins
A Gap in Nature by Elspeth Sandys (Quentin Wilson Publishing, 2025), 223pp, $37.50
After a long and distinguished career writing fiction, plays and memoirs, garnering multiple awards and residencies along the way, Elspeth Sandys shows no sign of running out of stories to tell. ‘Some people go to therapy. I write,’ Sandys has said.
Her tenth novel, A Gap in Nature, is ambitious in its scope. Spanning 50 years, it follows the lives of three protagonists across three generations, moving between England and New Zealand and back again. The novel’s ambition, however, is not limited to its historical range and shifts of narratorial focus. Sandys is also unafraid to return to familiar territory in depicting twentieth-century New Zealand life—migration and war, marriage and parenting, the decline of small towns—which allows her to continue her longstanding fascination with the impact of family history on our lives and choices. For example, the story of her adoption and its consequences was the subject of Sandys’ first memoir, What Lies Beneath, published in 2014. In A Gap in Nature, this persistent curiosity about how we are shaped by the family of our childhood underpins every character’s story, exemplifying Philip Larkin’s famous observation that parents ‘fill you with the faults they had / And add some extra, just for you’.
The novel’s first section, covering 1940–61, introduces readers to the family of May and Wally Nicholls in Claytown, a fictionalised location in the heartland of the North Island. Following the outbreak of war, Wally enlists, and May’s isolation from the tight-knit community is exacerbated during her husband’s extended absence. Unlike Wally, a popular local man, May is a recent immigrant from England who seems to have cut all ties with her past but finds little to her liking in her new home, earning few friends in Claytown. When Wally returns to his wife and six-year-old son David, the changes of the war years accelerate the couple’s estrangement. May is excessively devoted to David, Wally believes, and the subsequent birth of a daughter, Jennifer, only amplifies the discord within the family.
In the second section (1962–72), focus shifts to the now adult David, living in a squalid bedsit in Earl’s Court while trying to build a career in the burgeoning television industry. Just as his mother had done, David disguises and dissembles his past, taking advantage of the distance from his family to reinvent himself. Quizzed by his boss about what has brought him to England, and whether his ambition might in time be outweighed by the pull of all he has left behind, David replies: ‘You can only be homesick for a place you want to return to.’ He begins to climb the career ladder, enters a dazzling social circle of creatives and radicals, then falls for an up-and-coming actress. So far, so fairy tale—a version of what most New Zealand men boarding a ship in the 1960s might have hoped to find in the old country. For David, though, ‘1968, the year he becomes a father, is also the year his life starts to fall apart’.
David’s decline and fall has far-reaching consequences that are explored in the final section, covering just two years (1991–92) and centred on Chloe, David’s daughter and May’s granddaughter. David has been absent from most of Chloe’s childhood, whereas May was an inescapable presence for David as a child—but both alternatives, too much parenting or too little, not only leave scars but also many unanswered questions that a grown-up child ignores at their peril. In A Gap in Nature, ‘what lies beneath’ ultimately won’t stay buried, although it is uncovered by minor characters who somewhat conveniently appear late in the day to reveal most of the family’s secrets to the curious Chloe.
Chloe’s quest eventually brings her to New Zealand for the first time, where she reconnects with her aunt Jennifer, a composer now living in Auckland. Conversations between niece and aunt unpack the extended family’s history but also allow Sandys to tease out the problem of how best to tell a story, how much truth can be put into words, and whose truth that might be. ‘Being told only one part of a story is a kind of lie,’ Jennifer tells Chloe at one point, although previously she had expressed a rather different view when Chloe, an English teacher, had asked her about the symphony she is composing. Chloe wonders if her aunt will be able to tell the story of May and Wally through music:
‘Doesn’t music make it harder?’
‘You’re the literary one. You tell me.’
‘Well, a novelist would want to fill in the gaps, but … You’re okay with gaps, aren’t you? With absences. … Can music describe absence?’
‘Better than words, I would have thought.’
In this fictional conversation might also be heard the echo of an earlier utterance by Sandys in her book Casting Off (2017), which she described in her author’s note as an ‘incomplete memoir’. ‘Out of respect for people close to me I have left large gaps,’ Sandys wrote. We sometimes keep a gap because of what is closest to us, Sandys seems to imply, as if distance—absence—can be a mark of intimacy rather than proof of estrangement. How to tell the difference, though, and how to make ourselves understood in the process, is a recurring problem throughout A Gap in Nature.
In a novel set before an era when email, the internet and mobile phones were a feature of global everyday life, communication between loved ones is often tortuous, whether they are dwelling in the same house or on opposite sides of the world. Anyone who travelled overseas in the period Sandys describes will remember the ‘thin blue aerogrammes’ that are sent back and forth across vast distances in A Gap in Nature. It is almost hard to imagine now—the awkwardness of fitting everything onto a single page that must then be folded and sealed just so; the care needed to open the flimsy letter; the emotional significance of finding one of those blue envelopes waiting. Sandys conveys all of this in her repeated references to aerogrammes, contrasting their materiality and their fragility: letters easily go astray, are misplaced or concealed. Heartfelt letters sometimes remain unopened because, once read, they can exert an emotional weight that coerces compliance from the distant recipient. Above all, such letters are easy to misinterpret—the ambiguity of words, the significance of silence—and thus serve an important function in this novel about the desire to find and express connection.
Gaps in stories, then, like the gap between truth and fiction, can signify very different things: a desire to deceive or a desire to respect; a claim to knowledge (I know what really happened but I’m not telling) or an admission of ignorance (I don’t really know what happened). In recent interviews, Sandys has talked about the prevalence of intergenerational trauma, how it has received greater attention since the time span covered in A Gap in Nature, and yet remains elusive—difficult to talk about, difficult to write about. In the novel, the darkest secrets concern forms of violence and abuse that very belatedly come to light, explaining everything. Or not quite. Truth. Fiction. Silence. Knowledge.
But given its 50-year span, and the momentous world events that it invokes in passing, A Gap in Nature is very economical in its treatment, coming in at less than 250 pages. Years and events are reeled off quickly, sometimes like a checklist, or a shorthand to ground readers briefly in a historical moment. One character’s penchant for protests in the 1960s, for instance, is never explored as a vital aspect of her inner life, or connected with her life choices as a mother or an actress. Protests are simply her thing, as a bohemian woman of her time, like tie-dye or cheesecloth. There is a tendency for characters to be constellations of attributes, carrying out actions that impact others around them while their motivations remain opaque to themselves as well as the reader. At times, I wondered if A Gap in Nature might have been better as a play or a TV drama, where there is less opportunity for the depth and nuance of characterisation we might want in a novel, and such condensation is expected.
Sandys’ title is taken from a passage describing the beauty and pageantry of Cleopatra in Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra, one of the plays that Chloe is teaching to her students. Privately, Chloe admits to struggling with the meaning of the phrase ‘a gap in nature’ in the speech where it appears: ‘What does it even mean? It sounds like a failing, a human flaw, but that’s not what [Shakespeare] is saying.’ Whether Sandys intends her readers to share Chloe’s puzzlement over this evocative phrase remains unclear. I confess I struggled to draw a clear connection with the novel’s title within the original context of the play, but as a phrase that sounds like something else—that ‘human flaw’ that Chloe suggests—it certainly resonates in this novel about human frailties that are magnified by time and distance. Regrets, recriminations and reconciliations ultimately link the generations of the Nicholls family to an inescapable past, but also offer a fragile hope for the future.
WENDY PARKINS is a Dunedin writer of fiction and non-fiction and a former professor of Victorian literature. She is the author of Every Morning, So Far, I’m Alive: A memoir (Otago University Press, 2019) and The Defiance of Frances Dickinson (Affirm Press, 2024), which won the Ngaio Marsh Award for Best First Novel in 2025.
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