MODERN NOVELS

If you like Angst, 21st-century agonised soul-searching, darkly traumatic tales of drug-addicted street life, or piercing sagas of authentically ethnic characters struggling with deprived and brutal conditions that inevitably strangle their creativity, stop now! My modern novels take a light-hearted look at late 20th-early 21st century life, with most of the characters coming from very ordinary middle-class Australian and New Zealand suburbia, and leading, on the whole, pretty ordinary lives, with the usual helping of highs and lows, opportunities and restrictions. You could, I guess, call them all social comedies which use a love story as a narrative device.

The PURIRI CHRONICLES are set in Puriri County, a fictional New Zealand district north of Auckland whose small, semi-rural towns are rapidly being overtaken by sprawling suburbia and its values. Each story is complete in itself, with a new set of characters, but in each we meet Polly and Jake from the first novel again, and as the chronicles proceed, many of the other characters also reappear.

The Pohutukawa Bay Affair: When Polly meets Jake no-one expects it to go anywhere. Well—the lady lecturer and the self-made millionaire? Jake Carrano has a chequered history in both his personal and his business life, rumoured bribes to Arabs being perhaps the least of it; he’s agin the government and the trade unions as well; and he’s pushing fifty. Polly Mitchell, who teaches linguistics at the university, is more or less the antithesis of everything he believes in. Except that she’s very, very pretty! But for a while things seem to go along swimmingly. Then a business rival is murdered on Jake’s patio, and everything goes pear-shaped… The two lovers, the detective on the case, Jake’s ex, her second husband and stepson, Polly’s academic colleagues, and even a local motel owner are radically affected by the repercussions of the murder.

The Members of the Institute: a tale of the fates of those involved with the new Pacific Institute of Political Studies in Puriri township. Most of the academic staff are recruited from overseas but they all, newcomers or New Zealanders alike, have to cope not only with new jobs in a new environment, but with all the vicissitudes of life itself: rotten marriages, broken relationships, brand-new relationships, past mistakes, and the usual complement of births, deaths and marriages. Although told with a light touch, this is in many ways a study of human vulnerability, as the members of the Institute come to terms with their new lives.

    In this second volume of the Puriri Chronicles we also follow the story of Polly and Jake from The Pohutukawa Bay Affair, as their twins are born, they move into their new house, and Polly’s cousin Hamish Macdonald emigrates from Scotland to become the new Director of the Institute.

The Antipodean Dream: As the visiting celebs fated to star in a New Zealand university drama club’s production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream grapple with a strange new environment, some of the locals find themselves more involved than they ever wanted or intended to be with the production and its leading players. And ditto for the stars, for whom there are some life-changing shocks in store, as new personalities and new circumstances gradually impinge and they discover they are out of their comfort zone as mere visiting firemen, and face to face with reality.

The American Refugee follows Sol Winkelmann’s struggles to find his feet in a new country as he determinedly emigrates to New Zealand in spite of warnings about mid-life crisis and the huge change it’s gonna be from life in Florida. The background of scruffy Blossom Avenue in an obscure rural area of North Auckland, with its “kids and ducks” lifestyle and its population of struggling artists and perennially broke schoolteachers, contrasts strongly with the choice suburb and the circle of well-off professionals frequented by the lady who is one of the reasons why Sol decides to emigrate… Conflicts and complications ensue, as Sol and this up-market lady find they’re also attracted to other people. And the inhabitants of Blossom Av’? As usual, they just get on with it.

The Conquest Of Carter’s Bay is set against the impact of a new university, privately funded by Sir Jake Carrano, on a rundown, semi-rural area at the far edge of Puriri County. Will the university bring prosperity to the region, or will it merely despoil the environment? Opinions are divided, especially as it’s set up as a cash-generating corporate entity designed to bring in overseas exchange. Alan Kincaid, its CEO (“Vice-Chancellor” in older, staider institutions) is there to further his career, seeing his job as a stepping-stone to greater things; the academics and support staff have varied motives, personal or professional or both. But one thing is sure: scruffy little Carter’s Bay has had its chips. Those who know Kincaid from way back are also sure that nothing is going to change his icy personality. And his distant cousin Catherine Burchett is miserably sure that he’s going to grab the family farm off her. But life is never predictable…

Another Country, the final volume of the Puriri Chronicles, follows Polly Carrano’s progress when she’s left a widow after twenty-two years of marriage to the billionaire Jake Carrano. People cope with such crises—or don’t cope—in different ways. Polly more or less copes. Not all of her family and friends understand when she donates the Carrano mansion for a children’s hospital and goes to live in a tiny beach house miles up an obscure inlet in North Auckland—but she came from an ordinary Kiwi farming family and was never comfortable with Jake’s lavish lifestyle. According to her old friend Jan Harper, Polly’s “the sort that needs a man.” Yes, well, taking up with a succession of them is one way for a still-pretty woman to cope. But none of them seem to be able to take the combination of femininity and intellectual detachment that’s always typified her. Another Country is a light-hearted but sympathetic account of Polly’s search for another life, a life that really suits her.

    As the scene switches from New Zealand to Zurich, Strasbourg and Paris, back to New Zealand and over to Australia, and finally back to obscure little Carter’s Inlet again, we catch up with many of the characters from the previous volumes of the Puriri Chronicles and The Ecolodges series, not least Sol Winkelmann in North Auckland and Jan Harper and Pete McLeod in Taupo.

The Captain’s Daughter centres round a television series in production. Possibly for anyone else a fellowship at London University entailing a sociological study of the dynamics of a workplace group would not result in a masquerade as “Lily Rose Rayne”, the 21st-century Marilyn Monroe, darling of the tabloids, and singing, tap-dancing telly actress—but Rosie Marshall from Sydney isn’t anyone else! In the intervals of filming The Captain’s Daughter, a silly saga of the Royal Navy flying the flag in the ’50s, the unquenchable Rosie stumbles from crisis to crisis, trying to conceal that the fact that she’s actually doing the telly stuff for her research, falling apparently hopelessly for a dishy but much older and very up-market real Royal Navy captain, falling into bed with a dishy British actor…

The Captain’s Wife: Now married, Rosie’s idea is that she’ll give up the TV stuff—not least because she’s pregnant. She’s got more than enough on her plate, with a big sociological research project to finish off and another one in the pipeline. But it’s a case of the best-laid plans, as Rosie plunges herself into finding someone to take over her television rôle in The Captain’s Daughter, and copes with the ups and downs of married life – “a lot harder than in your up-yourself carefree bachelor-girl days you ever imagined it was gonna be. I mean, three days back from your honeymoon and barely over the jet-lag when his new orders arrive?” And then there’s the baby, due in September. September 2001…

The Captain’s Daughter Downunder, the third in “The Captain’s Daughter” series, centres round Rosie’s cousin Dot Mallory. Bright, sensible Dot has been leading an ordinary Aussie suburban life, with a good job in IT. She’s come through a fair bit, but things are going well. But when the movie company arrives in Australia to film The Captain’s Daughter, everything changes, not just for those directly involved. The more so as Rosie, now famous as “Lily Rose Rayne”, is the star, and Dot’s a dead ringer for her, and David Walsingham, the sardonic composer she met 5 years back and decided never to think about again, is doing the music for the movie.

Summer’s Lease: A Story of the Captain’s Cousins: In a tale of life, love, and mishaps, Colin Haworth, invalided out of the British Army after being shot up in Iraq, plunges himself into setting up a crafts enterprise in a Hampshire village, alternately hindered and helped by villagers and in-comers alike. Alongside some hilarious scenes of village life and the idiocies of a new TV production in which two of Rosie’s Aussie cousins are involved (The Captain’s Daughter: The New Generation), there are disappointments as well as successes, and deaths and disasters as well as weddings and new beginnings.

The Lallapinda Revenge: Hugo Kent, the CEO of the big multinational, KRP, is “an innately fastidious man” who for many years has avoided extra-marital relationships. That is, until he meets the blonde, curvaceous and unscrupulous “Kitten” Manning. The four Manning sisters from Sydney have vowed revenge on those responsible for their grandfather’s losing Lallapinda, a large South Australian outback cattle station, and KRP owns the bank that foreclosed on him. In this light-hearted Aussie take on How To Marry a Millionaire, reality gradually impinges on the girls’ schemes, and the course of the great revenge does not run smooth. As the plot unfolds a bright and not always flattering light is shone on bourgeois Australian life in the first decade of the 21st century.

    The Lallapinda Revenge introduces the Sydney temp agency, RightSmart, which will reappear in the Australian ecolodge stories.

The Project Manager is a spin-off from The Captain’s Daughter quartet, and the prequel to a new set of modern social comedies, “The Ecolodges” series. When go-getting Hill Tarlington gets out of the British Army he drifts for a bit, at one point heading up a war-gaming course for execs on the Yorkshire moors, but eventually takes a job as project manager with YDI, a large hospitality concern which specialises in converting old country houses into up-market hotels but is also getting into the ecolodge market. The job goes well but when he bumps into the unimpressionable Hattie Perkins, whom he stupidly lost track of back in the war-gaming days, the course of true love definitely doesn’t run smooth. For one thing, Hill’s family is posh and she’s an unpretentious Aussie. For another thing, who, exactly, is Hattie Perkins…? There are a lot of trials as Hill knuckles down to the Hattie project—a Gulf Syndrome scare, for one—but a lot of laughs, too.

This series takes as its background some environmentally friendly hospitality establishments in Australia and New Zealand.

    The first of the New Zealand ecolodge stories takes us to New Zealand’s central North Island, where Hill Tarlington’s preliminary investigation of an ecolodge site in The Project Manager bears fruit. The first novel picks up the story around the time that YDI is looking for an architect:

The Ecolodges By The Lake: The two ecolodges by New Zealand’s Lake Taupo are Pete McLeod’s Taupo Shores Ecolodge, a converted fishing lodge which has been there for years, and the brand-new, very exclusive Fern Gully Ecolodge. When the Jackson family’s up-market English cousin Moyra’s son, Max Throgmorton, breaks his leg on a skiing holiday at nearby Mt Ruapehu, the results are unexpected. Max falls for one of the Jackson girls and is hired as the new ecolodge’s architect. Things look good, and then the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami strikes, resulting in a completely new scenario for the permaculture venture next to Taupo Shores and some surprising consequences for both the Jacksons and the Throgmortons.

Summer Season continues the story of Taupo Shores Ecolodge, as the elderly Pete McLeod’s daughters by his first wife, Jayne and Libby, both now in their forties, arrive from Brisbane to spend the Christmas holidays. When two well-off unattached men of the right age rent one of the very up-market houses on the far side of the big lake for the summer, more than one person makes the comparison with Pride and Prejudice. But although pleasant, unassuming Andrew does seem right for the sweet-natured widowed Jayne, there’s considerable doubt as to whether tall, dark, dashing Aidan is going to be Libby’s Darcy… Everybody’s weaknesses are more than revealed, if some strengths are, too, as the ecolodge undergoes a crisis that eventually results in the lesson that most mere human beings are pretty fallible and need to be cut some slack.

    The Australian ecolodge stories move the setting to obscure Potters Inlet, a tiny finger of the sea winding inland for miles from the coast of New South Wales.

The Road To Blue Gums: Jack Jackson’s a jobbing builder from New Zealand with a failed marriage and a failed business, and Gil Sotherland’s a former British Army officer with a collapsed lung and a wonky shoulder—but they both end up in Potters Road, three hours’ drive out of Sydney over bad back roads. Running along the crest of a tiny peninsula, the road ends in magnificent views eastwards down narrow Potters Inlet and northwards to the endless blue ranges of the Great Dividing Range. All it contains, scattered amongst the sparse native bush of the area, is an embryo B&B and a couple of ancient bungalows—but because of Gil and Jack, Blue Gums Ecolodge will eventually rise there. And they themselves will find new interests, new jobs, and new loves in Potters Road.

    The Road To Blue Gums continues the story of RightSmart, the temp agency first encountered in The Lallapinda Revenge, as Jack goes job-hunting in Sydney—and incidentally bumps into George MacMurray, whose dad lives up Potter’s Road. At the same time we find out what has become of Dot and David, Ann and Bernie, and Deanna and Bob from The Captain’s Daughter Downunder, now settled along the road.

Temps: The unquenchable Iain Ross—once described by a British Army superior as “insubordinate, subversive, individualist, undisciplined, lacking due respect for authority, and incapable of functioning as part of a team”—gradually comes to terms with life, love and the pursuit of suburban happiness after his Army career fizzles out ingloriously, the lovely Veronica rejects him, and his ex-Russian mafia stepfather packs him off to a new start in Australia. We get a sometimes hilarious, sometimes horrifying, sometimes sympathetic look at the modern Aussie way of life, as Iain signs on with RightSmart, a small Sydney employment agency, and takes on temp jobs ranging from “green frogging” for a suburban garden centre promotion, to butlering at the exclusive Blue Gums Ecolodge. Meanwhile, Veronica decides to try her luck as a temp in Australia…

    Temps continues the story of the firm of RightSmart and its personnel, first encountered in The Lallapinda Revenge, and of Blue Gums Ecolodge in Potters Road, introduced in The Road To Blue Gums. Whether Iain will opt to throw in his lot permanently with either of them remains to be seen.

    A spin-off from the Australian ecolodges novels is The Trials of Harriet Harrison, in which we again encounter the temp agency RightSmart and its personnel, and some of the personalities from Blue Gums Ecolodge:

The Trials Of Harriet Harrison: At forty-one Harriet’s had more than time enough to discover that there are no kindred spirits in the entire world. Certainly not in Australia, where she’s fated to live. A brief encounter with a Lord Peter Wimsey lookalike during a trip to Oxford doesn’t turn out well. She’s scarcely back home when her father dies and her mother comes down with Alzheimer’s. Her sister and brother-in-law are decent people, but snowed under with mortgages, teenagers, and two jobs. So Harriet’s the one who has to cope, a very square peg in an uncomfortably round hole. Her varied misadventures, not least with assorted males who judge her not unattractive dark-haired person by its cover, provide some hilarious vignettes of the suburban wilderness that is modern Australian life.

The Lalla Effect: In real life a fairytale encounter doesn’t always have a happy ending. So in 1994 when Lalla Holcroft, a pretty but unpretentious New Zealander with little self-confidence and (QED), a bossy mother, arrives in Canberra and is taken for a different Miss Holcroft altogether by Peter Sale, a rich English businessman who isn’t a martinet but is used to expecting to get his own way, their affaire does not end well. Ten years down the track Lalla, far more sure of herself, is working in the Cook Islands at a luxury hotel, and this is when Peter catches up with her and is jolted out of his bleak, if comfortable, bachelor existence. As the story continues into the 21st century, we find out whether Lalla will be the making of him.