Pentimento
Rosemary Wildblood
Wily Publications, $30.00,
ISBN 9781927167090

Settling into a novel can be a lot like going away on holiday with people you don't know, or settling into a new flat. You're meeting and getting to know a whole bunch of people for the first time. You hope you'll like the principal characters or, at the very least, find them interesting: if you don't, a long ride looms.

Novels are sometimes divided into two kinds: plot-driven and character-driven. But even in a so-called "plot-driven" novel, where the characters are subordinated as objects of interest to the journey that gets them where they're going, character still matters: if you can't believe in the characters, their lives,their emotions, their hopes, their dreams,its hard to care about what happens to them. The success or failure of a novel depends to a very large extent upon the ability of the author to get you to believe in them. Mere description is not enough: hair and eye color, body shape and height, gender, age - it's all just thumbing clay into the likeness of a living person. It takes a touch of magic to work that Pygmalionesque transformation by which a character in fiction comes into being.

It seems, for the duration of part one of Rosemary Wildblood's second novel, Pentimento, that we are entering a character-driven novel. It's a conventional enough opening: young and aspiring painter Cliff Padget first claps eyes on Serena Worsley when she stands in as a last-minute replacement for the model in his life-drawing class. She is, we are told from the outset, beautiful:

Everything about the model was pale and pearly - the hair, the wide grey eyes and luminous skin - each lissom line of her standing up to their scrutiny. At Megan's request she tipped her head further to the light. Her face, surrounded by the profusion of light hair, was so arresting that many of those sketching her breathed out an audible sigh.

Naturally, Cliff is smitten, and engineers a meeting. They become a couple and soon marry, although their relationship is up and down: Serena is anything but serene by nature. She is a bundle of nerves and ambition, probably (it is later speculated) bipolar. Cliff hangs in there, and even forgives a dalliance between Serena and his best mate and art school buddy, Doyle Fletcher. But it all ends tragically, the first of a number of surprises the novel springs upon the reader.

The trouble with Serena's character is that while she is not the "main character" of the novel, she is intended to be pivotal nonetheless, a conditioning influence on Cliff's character. A pentimento, after all, is the showing-through of a painting that has been painted over, often revealing changes of heart on the part of the artist (hence the word, from the Italian for repentance). And yet, while we are told how "arresting" and "amazing" Serena is, we never quite manage to see it for ourselves. She doesn't dazzle us as she dazzles those around her.

The main character of Pentimento turns out to be Rachel, whom Cliff meets as the fiancee of an executive in the company sponsoring a major New Zealand exhibition tour he is conducting. Cliff lives and works in New York these days: he has realised his ambitions. or is in the process of doing so. We know (because we have been told) that Cliff can be a smooth operator when he wants to, and he deploys some of this charm on Rachel. Then, it seems, it's only a matter of time before the stars will uncross themselves and they will be together. The various impediments - Rachel's fiancé (whom we are encouraged to dislike from the outset), distance, Cliff's grief - will fall away. There will, surely, be a happy ending. But Wildblood seems to be interested in the effects of the unforeseen upon our best-laid plans, and works hard to ensure that we take nothing for granted.

While Pentimento's narrative arc is well-managed, the characterisation is a little weak, which means the novel realizes only some of its potential. The author prefers to tell us about the characters rather than to show us what they're like. A number of the characters are given the same mannerisms of speech. Serena, Rachel and Cliff all use the slightly unusual phrase, "This is true", which has a mildly homogenizing effect - although several different characters are speaking, it's the author's voice you can hear.

 

John McCrystal is a Wellington writer and reviewer.