Books
London calling
by Paula Morris
Emily Perkins’ new novel, about the city she lived in for 10 years, was written back home in New Zealand.
After a decade in London, Emily Perkins is usually found closer to home these days, taking her children to school in Grey Lynn, racing up to the University of Auckland to teach a class or chatting with fellow writers on TV1’s The Book Show. But at the moment she’s harder to track down: I reach her in a Toronto hotel room just before she’s due to fly off to the UK for a launch and -festival appearances promoting her fourth book, Novel About My Wife.
An atmospheric psychological thriller, Novel About My Wife is a departure in many ways for Perkins, not least in its evocation of a dark and sometimes desperate London. “Place hasn’t been a driving force in my novels or stories in the past,” she agrees. “I’ve been more interested in playing out relationships. But this novel is different from my previous work. It’s much more plot-driven, more tightly structured, more place-specific. The story just needed this treatment.”
It’s 12 years since Perkins published her acclaimed, reputation-making short-story collection Not Her Real Name, and seven years since her last book, The New Girl. The gap in her output isn’t hard to understand – three children under the age of eight, serious family illnesses, the move from London to Auckland. “The kids do explain some of it, but I don’t want to pin it on them,” Perkins laughs. “There are a number of contributing factors. I abandoned two novels fairly far down the track.”
One, a novel about making a film about the life of early Renaissance artist Fra Lippo Lippi, was abandoned after several months of research and writing when Perkins found out a film was already in progress. “I was gutted,” she says, “but I wasn’t going to get myself into a race.” There were other diversions and dead ends – an attempt at a play for the Royal Court Theatre in London, a screenplay adapting someone else’s book. “But nothing went anywhere, and this novel started to bubble up.” Perkins discovered she “had things to say about London, like the financial pressures, and the decaying social fabric. The novel needed to be set there, and it was an enormous pleasure for me to be able to evoke the place”.
Three years ago, she was able to sell the book to Bloomsbury based on the completed first section, and then life got in the way again. “We’d been through a rough year,” Perkins explains. “My husband [artist Karl Maughan] had been really ill. My third child was born and she was really ill. We came out to New Zealand to convalesce, staying in a house on Waiheke. Our eldest daughter should have been starting school, so we decided to stay. It was an easier decision to make there, rather than in London, sitting around with all our London friends.”
The move to Auckland, she says, “worked out really well for all of us in all sorts of unexpected ways”. The “time-wasting hassle” of living in London disappeared, and Perkins found herself with “more time to read and write”. She was able to continue work on Novel About My Wife in 2006, when she was the Buddle Findlay Sargeson Fellow, leaving her home every day for a quiet writer’s studio on the edge of Auckland’s Albert Park.
Finishing her London novel at a distance perhaps intensified its thematic interest in the experience of outsiders.
The main characters are 40-something Tom, who’s English, and his enigmatic Australian wife, Ann. Tom, the novel’s narrator, “crucially assumes that his culture is the dominant culture and the norm”, Perkins says. “This was a big motivating part of writing the novel for me, that English parochialism. It doesn’t occur to them. For all his urbanity, Tom is a very parochial voice.” He spends the novel “trying to find Ann’s voice, and he could have done that when she was there in the room in front of him. There’s a cultural truth in that”.
But Perkins is too sophisticated a writer to opt for one-sided critique. There’s an edge in the way Novel About My Wife presents Australasians abroad. Ann is wary of the confederacy of nationality in a foreign place, of belonging to what she calls the “Voluntary Exile Society”. “With Ann, it’s fundamental,” Perkins says, “because she’s left Australia and tried to jettison her past and reinvent herself. A large concern of the novel is how far this is possible.”
Did Perkins share that wariness during her own London years? “I supposed one of the things I’d resist in general is being dragged into a group. That group might be ‘New Zealanders in London’. I knew plenty of New Zealanders in London, but when you think of them as a group, it denies the individual.” And the point of living in London, she suggests, is the individuality of the experience. “A city like London is so deliciously big you can disappear. For New Zealanders, having that anonymity is a nice experience.”
Perkins is no stranger to group affiliations and guilt-by-association. In the mid-90s, she took a class in creative writing at Victoria University, and has been labelled a leading light of the so-called “Manhire School” ever since. It’s a tag, she says, that’s attached “only in New Zealand, and I’m not even sure how much anymore. There are more recently published writers who can carry the can now.”
Page 1 2 
