Bronwyn Wylie-Gibb
At the Grand Glacier Hotel by Laurence Fearnley (Penguin, 2024), 288pp, $37
Laurence Fearnley’s most recent novel At the Grand Glacier Hotel is elegant, thoughtful and accomplished—and at times very funny too. This is the third book in Fearnley’s series using the five senses as inspiration: Scented (2019) deftly explored smell, while touch, in ways both subtle and obvious, underpinned Winter Time (2022). At the Grand Glacier Hotel is about hearing and, sometimes, not hearing.
Libby and Curtis, young and impecunious, are on a campervan holiday (complete with a suddenly vomiting toddler) when they glimpse a large hotel, nestling in lush gardens at the foot of a glacier; peaceful and lovely, it seems the epitome of glamour. One day, they decide, they’ll come back to the West Coast and enjoy the imagined pleasures and glories of the grand hotel. Many years later, wanting to celebrate the end of Libby’s rigorous year-long cancer treatment, they have finally returned to the remembered Shangri-La. It is still grand, comfortably luxurious but also pleasantly homey. The garden is still lush, nestled in native bush. The glacier however has retreated; it is not so grand and no longer visible from the hotel. They’ve driven from Dunedin and are settling in when Curtis realises he’s left his glasses and phone in Wanaka where they stopped for lunch. The following day he heads back to collect them. Libby is happy to stay tucked up in comfort; both of them, she realises, quite like the idea of a few hours apart, doing their own thing. As it often does, the West Coast rain pours down, leaving roads blocked, many plans upset, and Libby and Curtis separated for several days.
Libby occupies a somewhat liminal space; she is no longer sick, her cancer has been removed, but she is not well either. The major surgery on the back of her thigh to remove a sarcoma has damaged her muscles, and the debilitating radiation she then endured has left her weak. Clumsy, sometimes in pain and confronting the realities and possible restrictions of her new normal, she is mourning the ‘before’ life, the shape of the ‘after’ life is still to be discovered. This unexpected, unlooked-for time on her own evolves into a surprisingly peaceful and oddly healing space for Libby to assess her past and consider her future. Fearnley captures Libby’s experiences as a newly compromised person with astute observation and an eye on the ridiculous, as Libby, frustrated at her weak and recalcitrant leg, gets herself into situations (ditches, deep bathtubs) which she literally cannot get herself out of.
James, another hotel guest, finds Libby cast in a ditch, contemplating her mortality all over again:
Breathing heavily, I struggled again as images of cows and horses trapped in muddy ditches played through my mind. Nothing worked; I was stuck. Though I had played out numerous scenarios of my death, ranging from the quietly dignified to the tragically operatic, I had never imagined that I might die in a puddle on a nature walk.
James is also at the hotel because of the weather; he’s come from an encampment in the bush where he’s been looking and listening for any sign or call of kōkako, long extinct in the south but rumoured to have returned. Their host, the eccentric hotelier Kendrick, desperately wants to find some proof that the birds have returned, and James is happy to help, to take some time out from his usual life.
Libby and James keep each other company a bit until their days are given focus when they find what seem to be clues to a treasure hunt. Their companionable, quiet friendship is well-observed, two strangers thrown together by circumstance, they are quite reserved with each other, and it feels like a genuine friendship between the 50-year-old Libby and the 30-ish James. Libby is the more proactive one; she is curious about the circumspect James and why he’s here, chasing sounds in the bush—well, we are eavesdropping on her thoughts, while James’ are hidden from her, and us. As they follow the clues, Libby starts to come back to herself after months of necessary illness-fighting and treatment-enduring withdrawal from the world, months of cossetting of energy, of sick-bedness. The physical effort of moving, the psychical effort of thinking about new ideas, places and people, draws her into the world again, requiring her to be now, not worrying about whether she’ll ever be as she was before, but living in her changed body, with her experiences of illness folded into her interactions with the world.
Ideas about sound and hearing are subtle and spare, deftly woven into the story. Fearnley evokes the sounds of the bush, the lovely, clear birdsongs, the roar of the rain-swollen rivers and creeks, the music at a village concert with simple, effective prose; nothing is over-described. Libby often mishears when people speak, caught up in her own thoughts: ‘“Are you cold?” “Just turned fifty, why?” He looked puzzled. I realised my mistake and corrected myself: “Not too cold, thanks.”’
A group of conferencing Esperanto speakers also staying at the hotel intrigues Libby; she listens hard to their almost understandable conversations. In the long days of Libby’s convalescence, listening was all she had energy for:
From my day-bed on the couch, I tuned into all the sounds around me. I didn’t have to move, or open my eyes, or talk, or eat, or smell. I learnt to distinguish between the birds that came down to feed. The chatter of the sparrows, the rasping slide of the green finches and the beautiful melody of the blackbird that pecked at apples. I could tell the time of day without looking at my watch, or phone. I knew when it was close to 3 p.m. by the banging of my neighbour’s car door, followed by the start of her engine. Twice a week, at 10.30 a.m., a taxi would arrive and toot its horn for the pensioner opposite us. The courier van entered our lane around 12.30 p.m. Its engine would be left idling as its heavy sliding door was pulled open, then shut. The sound would set a nearby dog barking.
On a visit to a kiwi hatchery, the eggs rock, the tiny bird inside responding to kiwi-like whistles it hears through its alabaster vessel and Libby is moved, thinking about her baby inside her, responding to her voice over twenty years ago. In contrast, the sudden frantic shrieking of a small animal in trouble makes her alarmed and frantic too—when she desperately orders it to accept her help, I laughed out loud, a reaction to the shock I’d felt at the vivid awfulness of the shrieks and distress Fearnley conjured. Following a clue to a seaside village, James and Libby find a book of poetry by locals, some of which are haiku, which have to be read aloud, sounded out, heard, in order to count the syllables per line, to ascertain if they are haiku or just a rule-breaking lovely arrangement of words.
Fearnley is a perceptive observer of people and their foibles. Her characters feel recognisable and relatable: the exasperated, irritated conversations of long relationships that get you nowhere yet are nevertheless comforting in that both of you are equally exasperated with the other; the exquisite joy of having some time apart in the same long relationship, doing only what you want without having to interact with another person; the excited local talking over the experts, desperate to show the wonderful, special things to the visitors; the adult child prepared to jump into action and organise the parents; the antagonistic, slightly feral teenagers, brave in a gang, mercilessly teasing each other’s tender places …
This is such an engaging read; I particularly enjoyed the burgeoning friendship between Libby and James, who slowly reveals himself more and more to Libby and to us. The creation of the Libby character is a striking achievement: a very real depiction of a person returning to life, by turns willingly and unwillingly, smoothly and stumbling, but finally resolute after a personally destabilising experience. Fearnley’s writing about the natural world around us here in Aotearoa New Zealand is always so good, it feels like a gift to the reader. In a few gracefully chosen words you see the mistletoe in the green damp bush, you hear the clear chimes of the korimako and tūī, you feel the power of the torrential rain and the sorrow of the retreating glacier, no longer visible from its Grand Hotel. I loved the ending of this book, it was so satisfying, and I had to read the very last few lines out loud—to hear them.
BRONWYN WYLIE-GIBB was a bookseller/book buyer in independent bookshops in Aotearoa and the UK for 36 years, most recently at the Otago University Bookshop. She lives in Ōtepoti Dunedin.
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