Breton Dukes
Delirious by Damien Wilkins (Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2024), 312pp, $38
Damien Wilkins’s new novel, Delirious, ends with main characters, Mary (an ex-cop) and Pete (an ex-librarian), shifting and stacking firewood. Firewood—that classic stocking-up-for-the-future chore. It will be slow work. They are both in their late seventies, both frail, both no more than a missed step from hospital or death. But they’ve survived. Spoiler: others in the book don’t. Will, their 11-year-old, dies when thrown from a ute driven by Shaun Anderson, a man who dies later in the book. Claire, Mary’s sister, has a brain tumour and dies. Gus dies. Barry dies. Margaret, Pete’s mum, suffers a sudden delirium that alters, and in a sense enhances, her personality, then she dies. A similar formula is applied for Mary’s nana. The book opens in the same year that Will died. Mary is alone at a bach on the Kapiti Coast. During a confrontation with a woman living in a van, the woman yells at Mary ‘Why. Don’t. You. Die.’
Death to begin with and firewood to end. Pete and Mary are preparing for winter, but will they see that wood burn? I’m not sure. Unspool the story 10 or 20 pages and Mary might have fallen down the steep internal stairs or, with her bad hearing, introversion and occasional confusion, isn’t she, just like her nana, getting dementia? And what about Pete, with his dodgy heart—two to one it gives out while he’s slogging across the sand dunes with his friend Ken. Because, put bluntly, Delirious is about death. About where we end up just before death.
There’s Claire, a drain in her head, repeating ‘Home’ over and over from her hospital bed. There’s Pete’s mum in hospital believing the doctors are assassins, and later in a rest home planning hits on other residents with a pair of scissors. Delirious is about the role a tragedy asks us to play, or rather the role the death of a loved one asks us to play. It’s about the stories tragedy causes us to live out. It’s about how death can be remarkable, all-embracing, and how it can school us, teaching us not to look away, but to come closer, and then closer still.
But it’s also about a marriage—a long marriage—and, with Pete and Mary as our exemplars, how we do and how we don’t communicate with our life partner. Then there’s how we navigate life, post-work (Pete’s volunteer work involves tending to those sand dunes), and where we might end up living the last of life. It’s also an account of how a changing world changes what we see when we turn to look back at who we’ve been and what we’ve done.
Damien taught me at the IIML in Wellington. Back then, he ran the fiction strand of the MA course. Now, he steers the whole enterprise. He’s written numerous books (novels especially) and won numerous awards. So, when it comes to storytelling, surely, by now, he knows exactly what he’s doing? To answer, let’s swoop—you soon notice that there are birds everywhere in Delirious—a little closer to the texture of the novel. Been to Harvey Norman recently? Those monstrous new TVs that are running an endless loop of pixel-bright foodstuffs—cubed cantaloupe, pudenda-pink watermelon, multi-layered sandwiches, golden yolk, oozing aioli—and a young be-whiskered man eating these delicacies, with every bristle on his chin and cheeks individuated? Observationally, just like those television screens, Wilkins hits high definition again and again.
The morning after Will dies, Pete and Mary have to travel to the camp to identify his body:
Just before 8 am a car sounded its horn. Mary said, ‘They’re here.’
Pete said, ‘They tooted?’
‘Yes, that’s the squad car.’
‘Jesus Christ, they’re picking up the parents of a dead child and they fucking toot?’
Heart-breaking, of course. But there’s also comedy. The cartoonish word ‘toot’. It’s so preposterous in this dreadful moment, which is why it lands. Lands too because we can see both Mary’s point of view and Pete’s. Sure, Pete has every right to rage, but what does he expect? The cops are just doing their job.
Here’s another example. Pete and Mary are discussing the possibility of buying a unit at the retirement village they have just been shown around: ‘They felt a growing excitement and because this was unexpected, the feeling was more intense.’ There are moments like this throughout the book when Wilkins is really perceptive—and thus, with his accuracy and humour, with his feeling for relationships and emotion and humanity, draws us deep into the story he is telling.
The scene where Mary and Pete go to identify Will’s body is a big one. A climax of sorts—though it comes a hundred pages from the end. Mary and Pete cajoled 11-year-old Will to go on the camp. Vaguely neurodiverse, Will loves animals and almost fits in. So a camp with other kids isn’t really his thing. Four nights in, he dies. Of course, his parents are wrecked by grief and guilt-stricken as they enter the camp cool store to identify him. All that emotion, the action, the descriptions: it’s really a hard scene to get right. You have to avoid cliché; you have to have mastery over pacing. It’s a balancing act in the high winds of action and big emotion. But as Damien used to tell us, there are some scenes you have to write. Not as backstory, not second-hand as dialogue, but in real time. This is one of these scenes.
Here are a few of the novelist’s moves worth highlighting. In the scene just before the cool store scene, Pete looks in on Will who is asleep: ‘He was sleeping in his usual posture, his neck twisted and his face pressed almost flat against the headboard.’ Okay, so the reader knows how Will sleeps. There’s a shift, and now, in the cool store: ‘Will was lying on his back, very still. Highly unusual, totally unlike Will. Where was his normal sleeping posture, the head pushed back?’ Wilkins levers that earlier scene to nail the description of Will’s dead body. A lesser writer might say something like, ‘He looked peaceful, like he was asleep.’ No, the way Will is lying is alien, unrecognisable and therefore dreadful. We were with Pete when he checked on his sleeping son, in that lovely moment with him, and so when we’re with him again, noticing the difference, understanding his son is dead, it’s utterly convincing.
In that same scene, when Mary sees Will she says to him: ‘We’re both here. It took us a while. Sorry about that. But we’re here now.’ Sorry about that. Exactly how a parent apologises to a child. Polite, kind, but also gently condescending. Like really the adult hasn’t done anything too much wrong. Power there in the accuracy of the observation, but even more power in the fact that we know, in Mary’s mind, that the real apology, the lifelong apology, is that she made Will go on the camp. That’s what she’s sorry for. There’s restraint from Wilkins. He doesn’t overplay Mary’s turmoil, just establishes that sweet apology, while faultlessly signposting the horror beneath. The scene ends this way:
Mary bent towards Will and carefully removed something from his white ear. A small black stone from the river. She placed the stone, with a tiny clicking sound, on the wooden table, where it continued to pulse.
About that ‘white ear’. It’s white because he’s dead and blood is no longer flowing. But also it’s because of the contrast he can make with the stone in the next sentence. Note that last word which barrels into the reader, which lights this scene up as genius. Pulse. It leans into how small, peculiarly shaped things keep going and going when set down in a certain way. Pulse. We expect this word in relation to Will. He has no pulse. He is still, his parents bend close and there is no pulse, no movement of the chest; but that’s too easy, that delivers only what we have seen again and again in hospital dramas. No, the stone is the thing with a pulse. He wants that word in the scene, right at the end, but he’s too skilful to use it on Will, it goes into the stone and what he’s saying is, look, life, here in this stone, life, it goes on.
There are other endings. There’s the ending when many years later Pete and Mary go to the river where Will died and meet the family of the man who caused Will’s death. There’s the ending where Mary reads the letters about her nana getting dementia. There’s the ending when Mary and Pete buy back their house. Then there’s the firewood—which rather than an ending is pointing to the final great drama coming over the hill. The how and where and why of Mary and Pete’s end.
Other than the ending in that cool room, none of the other endings is exactly packed with drama. There’s no conventional climax—which makes this a deeply unconventional book. It’s gentle story, slow in places, utterly human. And for that final reason it carries an immeasurable power. Immeasurable, because, of course, we bring ourselves to any story we read. And, like Damien, maybe you have had a sister die, or a mum go nutty. Or, like me, you might have a boy similar in age to Will who rides close to the periphery. And so, when I read Delirious for the first time, it was in this heavy state of emotion. Grief for Will, fear for my son, but also joy, joy mostly, joy in the mastery of the craft, joy in the range of emotions Wilkins brought out in me, joy for the wonderful dance Wilkins has his characters put on.
Damien taught that if you have a character in a story or novel, no matter how small their part, you have to put the spotlight at least once on that character. They have to get their moment.
So, as part of their retirement, Ken and Pete work on dune restoration at the beach. They’ve partnered up for years. Wilkins gives Ken a good long introductory paragraph. A bit of background, a few anecdotes, not enough to slow the pace of the story too much, but enough for us to be right in there with Ken when Wilkins has him teaching some newbies about agapanthus removal: ‘He was a good educator, Pete reflected. The men listened closely, grinning and nodding. With his windblown silver hair standing on end and his brown weathered knees, Ken looked like a dune creature himself, as if he’d crawled from some burrow, drawn himself up to full height and was now in command of the habitat.’
And there Ken is—talk about seeing a character.
Wilkins gets called a clever writer. He’s a good educator, he’s brilliant at craft, so the nonsense conclusion is that he can’t also possess emotional force. He’s incredibly eloquent and funny in a knowing way, so maybe also he’s too neat, with the haircut, those muted tones of his slim-fitting cardigans? But—he always delivers power. See his YA book Aspiring. See Max Gate, his marvellous book about Thomas Hardy. However, I think Delirious hits hardest. In Delirious, Wilkins disappears entirely and that’s what makes it a great book; it’s what makes a masterpiece—the absence of author, combined with riveting content, faultless craft and heart, heart, heart.
BRETON DUKES has written three collections of short stories, his last, What Sort of Man, was published in 2020 by THWUP. He is currently working on a novel-length project, tentatively titled The Idea of Love. He lives in Dunedin with his wife and three boys.
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