Fiona Farrell

In 2013, Farrell received Creative New Zealand's premier award, the Michael King Fellowship, to write twin volumes, one fiction, one non-fiction, prompted by the Christchurch earthquakes and the reconstruction of the city. The Villa at the Edge of the Empire, was shortlisted for the non-fiction section in the 2016 Ockham NZ Book Awards while its fictional twin, Decline and Fall on Savage Street was published to critical acclaim in 2017 and received that year's NZSA Heritage Book Award for fiction. Together, the books have been described as ‘a wonderful piece of art.’

A villa. Not too large. Not one of the twenty-seven roomed fantasies that introduce his magnum opus: his catalogue of One Hundred Designs for New Zealand Residences. Not the two-storyed extravagance of Smoking Room, Billiard Room, Fernery and the rest, but something more modest: ten rooms, perhaps. A substantial villa for the man who is on his way, and for his dependants. A villa combining tradition with modernity, the best of the past with contemporary comfort, for that is the style for this country, where public buildings favour imperial gravitas with columns and Roman porticoes, along with ample windows and modern plumbing.

And when they leave the public realm, the citizens whom luck and industry have favoured like to stroll home to one or two storeys of vaguely Gothic timber and gabling, or perhaps Georgian brick, with bathroom and kitchen in the contemporary American manner, ideally linked to the modern marvels of metropolitan sewerage systems, gas and electricity, all set behind the fences of a pleasantly private quarter-acre. A house like this, for example: the ten-roomed villa, taking shape beneath the architect's busy pen. (p.11)

Midwinter, damp and grey, the river a ribbon of low-hanging fog. And there it was, half-buried beneath periwinkle, its walls dimpled with damp rot under a cloak of ivy. A leafless vine entangled the front porch, ornamented with the fluffy seed heads of old man's beard and fallen leaf lay knee-deep on the path between overhanging branches and the whole place reeked of damp and decay, cat pee and desolation.

Perfect.

Min stood in the overgrown garden, jeans soaked to the knees. She'd regret that later: flares took absolutely ages to dry. Beneath her sodden boots lay bricks and broken glass. Beer bottles littered the porch, and someone had set a fire at the foot of the steps where a half-burned wire wove rusted over charred wood and a shabby sofa and armchairs slumped either side in a parody of three-piece gentility. (p.127)

What is the point of inventing stories when reality eclipses imagination?

A little way off in the future, during a time of plague and profound social collapse, a group of friends escape to a house in the country where they entertain themselves by playing music, eating, drinking and telling stories about their lives. There are tales of thieves and pirates, deaths and a surprise birth, a freak wave and many other stories of misadventure resulting in unexpected felicity.

The Deck borrows the motifs of Giovanni Boccaccio’s 14th-century masterpiece, The Decameron, in which another small group gathered to avoid contagion and passed the time telling stories. But what is the role of fiction, this novel asks, as civilisation falters?

Sunlight glints on a harbour and a breeze bellies the curtains at an open window. An undifferentiated hum of traffic and machinery rises from the city. Someone is drilling something in the old Edwardian villa next door and across the road the children at the day-care centre are banging away on the xylophone they bring outside on sunny days. Overlying the hum is a cheerful gamelan bing bang bong.

Beyond the harbour stretches the ocean, bordered as usual at the horizon by the mass of cloud that could be hills or snow-capped mountains. Air and vapour only but so seemingly solid that Captain Cook, sailing down this coast on his first voyage, detoured many miles to the east over three days in order to satisfy his lieutenant that this was no great continent. 'In search of Mr Gore's imaginary land,' he wrote grumpily in his journal. He himself was 'very certain we saw only clouds'.

The imaginary land has always been present. (p.12-13)