Cosmic connection

Wellingtonian's confident debut blends travel mystery and domestic drama with quiet meditation on fate vs free will.

- BY DI STARRENBURG

Gina Butson's debut novel is - much like its cover - a kaleidoscope of colour and place. Over the course of 15 years, from country to country, the main character, Thea, runs from her past and navigates friendship and tragedy along the way. The story traverses mountain tops, clubs flickering under strobe lights, wind-lashed coastlines and gravesides. It is at once a travel novel, a mystery, a domestic drama and a thoughtful meditation on guilt and grief. Butson has a talent for bringing a place to life. Each setting - Muriwai, Ruapehu, San Pedro, Melbourne, Hobart, Wellington - is sensorially rich: from the “bite of ice-tinged air” in the King Country, where “wisps of mist settle into the crook of the land”, to San Pedro's “crocodile's back of dark green peaks”, where buses line the cobbled roads like “many footed dragons” and blare different soundtracks, the “music clanging in overlapping waves”. This colour, movement and life is virtual tourism for the reader, and provides ground on which the novel's thematic weight can land.

The story begins with an unnamed catastrophe for which Thea feels responsible. What happened, exactly, is withheld from the reader for much of the novel, creating a central mystery that drives the story. Thea drifts “like a piece of shipwreck on ocean currents” through places and relationships, chased by this secret.