Short of money, she is tempted by a lucrative post as private nurse of another soldier, Paul, who has also returned to Mansfield. Paul is from a wealthy family but no longer knows his wife, his home or anything about his past in New Zealand. He has lost all memory of his life before being wounded during an engagement in France.
The novel concerns Elizabeth's care of Paul, her determination to do him justice when all about him want the impossibility of his returning to the mind of the man he was before he was wounded. This story is about battles of wills and ideologies as well as the healing power of love.
Yet Nixon's novel is also, and equally, about the healing properties of storytelling itself. The nurse tells bedtime fairy stories to her son, about a balloonist who leaves his family to explore the world. Like many stories told by parents (and grandparents) to children, this story starts as one thing and, through the retelling and embellishments, over time becomes something else: the story itself acts as a special bond between mother and son, between teller and listener.
When nursing the man without a memory, Elizabeth also begins to tell him stories that bear allegorically upon the situation in which he finds himself. The stories to son and patient are about circumstances in which kindness and care are contrasted with rigidity or greed, humanity with inhumanity.
It would spoil a very good story - the novel itself - if the reviewer were to reveal more details of the unfolding plot, interwoven with great skill with the further tales that Elizabeth tells. But of course the main plot itself is a story, told us by a writer, as Carl Nixon makes clear from the beginning. Literature, however heavy the burden of the text, is simply (or rather not so simply) storytelling.
This playing with the reader delays engagement with the main story but fortunately Nixon moves away from his own preoccupation with his conceit, and does what a good writer can do, gets the reader to believe in the characters and the setting.
This polarisation of opposites is a strong feature of the novel: Elizabeth and Paul are like Beauty and the Beast and the pragmatism of kindness is set against the cruelty of ambition, thwarted expectations and rigidly adhered-to models of care.
Above all, those who can listen to a story and hear the surface and subtexts are upheld over those whose minds are not open to the riches and alternative ways of thinking that stories can bring. Nixon brings home to us why literature is rightly placed among the humanities.
- Peter Stupples teaches at the Dunedin School of Art.
