Delirious
by Damien Wilkins

Recently, our elderly neighbour packed up his house for sale. We live on a challenging hill and he could no longer maintain his section. We watched him potter about, the trailer in the driveway regularly filled and emptied, to no real effect. Then his family arrived, and suddenly everything was power washed, weeded and removed, and there was a For Sale sign out the front.

We have other elderly neighbours. My children make them scones, and in return, a bundle of small plants, their roots wrapped in soggy paper hand towel and tinfoil, might be left on our doorstep. We talk on the street, in conversations that are slow and gentle, and frequently surprising. One neighbour casually mentions her past as a Jungian analyst; another opens the garage to reveal a racing car.

Spending the week with Damien Wilkins’ new novel, Delirious, was a little like living beside these neighbours. We meet Pete and Mary as they too pack up their house for sale, amid dark hints about the past. The novel follows the same pattern as those conversations – small talk, pleasantries and shared worries, and then bam! a startling revelation.

Delirious has a lot of what you’d expect from Wilkins – a book that’s about ‘something’, that has intellectual meat on its plot bones, beautiful writing, and a very, very New Zealand setting. Director of the International Institute of Modern Letters at Te Herenga Waka / Victoria University, Wilkins has a well-known name; he was made an Arts Foundation Laureate in 2013. Yet his significant body of work – 14 novels over thirty years – has not drawn recent popular attention in the same way, say, as books by Emily Perkins, Eleanor Catton or Elizabeth Knox. He hasn’t won the major fiction prize at our national book awards since 1994, for his first novel, The Miserables, although his sole novel to date for younger readers, Aspiring, won the YA category of the 2020 NZCYA Awards.

Delirious is ostensibly the story of two elderly people making choices about their living arrangements in their twilight years. There’s a quiet sense of humour and a philosophical approach towards the ageing process. Their neighbour Jan describes it as ‘… limping into the sunset…’, but Pete and Mary aren’t limping too badly yet. They’re being proactive, sensible, pragmatic. They live a privileged existence of books and baches, dogs and financial security. They make decisions about what to keep and what to discard as they disassemble their house with a beautiful view and bad access (how very Wellington), walk a dog, eat dinner with their nephew, and move to a retirement community. But like my elderly neighbours, this surface story belies a greater revelation, if readers can be patient.

Pete and Mary are preparing for their future, but their past, shared and separate, is inescapable. It’s always lurking, even if Wilkins refuses to let the reader have a good look at it until they’ve earned it. The book opens with: ‘That year. That year. People always said, that year.’  The significance of ‘that year’ is later revealed to be the year, 40 years prior, when Pete and Mary lost their only child, Will, to a school camp accident. Mary’s beloved sister dies two years later, and Mary’s thoughts are haunted by them:

Her sister and Will were often paired in her mind. Lately they were there a lot, a double act she didn’t know what to do with except watch them come and go, come and go, a bit like the two crims who’d taken the branch to launch themselves over the fence and into darkness. Wait! Stop! Halt! She gave chase and they always escaped. Here they were again.

Mary implies that she is chasing her past down, whereas for much of the book it’s chasing her. And Pete, poor Pete, has ‘continued to grip the fact of his son’s death so close.’ So close that when asked about children at the rest home, he struggles to say Will’s name. Their memories are pushed away, held at arm’s length, until Mary receives a phone call regarding their son’s death. They must decide how much they let the past into their present.

Wilkins is demanding of his reader as he explores Pete and Mary’s grief, knowing he can be sure of their attention. Their grief, both acknowledged and suppressed, permeates the novel, and the windswept Kapiti coast provides a fitting background, with its water ‘grey, like some molten metal. She [Mary] watched it all fade into darkness, the seams of water and sky disappearing. It looked like the liquid in which submarines would be suspended. A strange wartime sea.’

The writing is sharp, clean, astute. There’s no need to reach for language beyond the ordinary, no showing off, just a quiet pleasing excellence throughout. I laughed, as only someone who has tackled agapanthus might, at Wilkins’ description of the workers at a beach dune clean up: ‘They nodded, happy, standing among the slaughtered agapanthus like proud soldiers.’ There’s nothing overtly emotional in the writing about Pete’s mother, who is suffering from dementia, or the loss of Will, although these two tragedies are often linked and Pete believes they are connected, that ‘her mental collapse might be associated with her grandson’s death. The back-to-frontness of it­—a boy she loved gone before she was gone.’ As Pete and Mary retreat into their own separate griefs, they are increasingly together and simultaneously further apart than ever. In the retirement community, Pete passes Mary her pills, and ‘[t]ouching the soft pad of flesh by her thumb became a highlight of his day, their one reliably intimate connection.’

Ageing is not a particularly sexy topic: it’s challenging material, and potentially difficult to find a readership for – do the elderly want to read about others like themselves slowly down-grading their lives? Do the middle-aged want to see what waits for them? Are the young at all interested? And yet, like living beside elderly people, the rewards of Delirious are significant. There’s always a bam! somewhere around the corner.

Our elderly neighbour, ironically, moved to Wellington. He’s closer to family. He’s hopeful of finding a house he loves like the one he left behind. He needs a place with a garage for his racing car.