Tim Jones
The Intentions Book, by Gigi Fenster (Victoria University Press, 2012), 305 pp., $35.00.
To keep the reader interested, a long narrative needs an engine, something that revs up at the beginning and keeps the narrative motoring along from commencement to conclusion.
Gigi Fenster has chosen a Rolls Royce of a story engine for The Intentions Book, her first novel. Morris Goldberg’s daughter Rachel has gone off on a solo tramp in the Tararuas, and now she is overdue from her tramp. Morris and his family gather round to watch, wait and try to do something useful. The title references the Intentions Book that trampers fill in when they embark on a tramp, stating where they are going and when they intend to emerge from the bush.
In my younger, fitter and more stoic days, I tramped in Mt Aspiring, Fiordland and Nelson Lakes National Parks. I braved snow, sandflies, kea with a liking for eating boots, and dodgy reconstituted bean dishes. But I’m scared of tramping in the Tararuas. These comparatively low, comparatively accessible mountains are seductively benign in good weather, but when a southerly sweeps across them, they turn deadly to novice and experienced tramper alike.
Rachel is an experienced tramper, but she is overdue, and the weather in the Tararuas is turning. Why did she go into the mountains alone, and will she make it out safely? That’s the story engine. But this story is about Morris, not Rachel: it’s about Morris, his parents, his son David, his deceased wife Sadie, and why Morris finds it so hard to show affection to anyone.
Morris is a loner who likes peace, quiet and order. He finds social cues difficult to understand and is touch-averse. Such characteristics are often associated with Asperger Syndrome, and there is a reference on page 86 that implies Sadie may have thought that Morris has Asperger’s, but the novel ends up finding other reasons for why Morris behaves as he does. As Rachel is very much Morris’ daughter, insight into Morris also leads to insight into Rachel, and how she might act when lost in the bush in bad weather.
The great strengths of this novel are the sophisticated, confident way in which it is told, and the depths to which Morris’s character is explored. The narrative ranges widely through Morris’ life, with childhood and young manhood receiving particular focus. Gigi Fenster handles the resulting flashbacks and flash-forwards well, and with a couple of minor exceptions I had no trouble understanding where, when and with whom the narrative currently rested.
There is one narrative tic that I found intrusive. It goes like this:
Morris himself had learned that lesson about twenty years earlier.
About twenty years earlier, Morris had sat at a river bank … (p. 112)
That repetition of the end of one sentence at the beginning of another to signal a shift in narrative time happened often enough in Part I of the novel that it began to irritate me.
I noticed a few other rhetorical flourishes that could have been pared back to the novel’s advantage, such as the ten pages spent explaining Morris’s profession to the reader: it’s an entertaining ten pages, and it’s where Gigi Fenster slips the Asperger’s reference in, but it could have been handled much less elaborately.
Yet it’s always easier to find small faults than to praise large virtues, and with the exceptions noted above, I thought the novel was very well-written: this author knows her way around a page.
I think that The Intentions Book is a very good novel, and two-thirds of an excellent one, but the second of the novel’s three parts frustrated me. Part II is devoted to Morris’ thoughts and dreams as he spends an uneasy night at his son’s house, waiting for news. I found this the least engaging section of the novel, and by the end of it, I was growing impatient. I wanted Morris to stop dreaming, wake up, and do something useful – or even something useless, so long as he acted. Your daughter’s missing in the bush, man. Get cracking!
This symptomises the other problem I had with The Intentions Book: Rachel deserves more attention than she gets. She remains a remote figure, a mirror of Morris rather than a person in her own right, and that makes it difficult to get fully invested in her fate. I never got a clear enough picture of Rachel to be convinced that, as an experienced, methodical tramper, she would actually have gone off on a multi-day solo tramp in the Tararuas. As her decision to do so drives the action of the novel, it felt as if the story engine was just a little out of tune.
Once Part III begins, the novel moves up a gear, and the journey to the ending is well worth taking. Does Rachel make it out of the Tararuas alive as the rain pours and the wind blows? That I won’t tell you, but I will say that the final pages do make the link between the forces that have shaped Morris and the forces that have shaped Rachel in a way that I found unexpectedly moving.
I recommend that you read The Intentions Book. I think you’ll like the things I liked, and the aspects of the novel that didn’t convince me may not bother you. But you still won’t get me into the Tararuas without my own personal mountain rescue team trailing along behind me.
TIM JONES is a poet, short-story writer, novelist, editor and blogger who lives in Wellington. His most recent collection of poems is Men Briefly Explained (Interactive Press, 2011). He won the NZSA Janet Frame Memorial Award in 2010.
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