Ithaca

By Lynley Dear

Let's first acknowledge the warning light.

The one that, reasonably enough, starts flashing in the back in the minds of potential readers when we tell them that Invercargill writer Lynley Dear's debut novel will take them from Jerusalem's Church of the Holy Sepulchre to Esk St and back, via a war and Seacliff asylum.

In publishing terms Ithaca is an immodestly big, ambitious story for a fictional debut. For most of its 370 pages this story spans four generations of mothers and daughters in New Zealand, and their menfolk, from the 1920s to the present. And, dear God, it is promoted as being "in the tradition of The Thorn Birds".

As a host of bad books are. This really isn't one of those.

It would be a disservice to think of any novel this beautifully crafted as some sort of sprawling saga.

How inelegant and inapt. Nothing in Ithaca sprawls. It captivates on each step on the journey as an intimate read, populated by vivid and mostly sympathetic characters, its period detail evoked with educated lightness. It is epic only in hindsight. Give it just a few pages to attain uplift and you'll find yourself wafting through the storytelling slipstream, pausing only to savour a particularly luminous description, or to recognise the bestirring of your own family memories.

The front cover carries a benediction from Deborah Challinor: "A sweeping, moving and inspiring love story. A treat to read. Lynley Dear is one to watch."

Tucked away on the back is another, from the former Southland Times editor Clive Lind: "One of the most moving stories I've read for a very long time ... I believe Lynley Dear has written a bestseller. In the end I couldn't put it down."

This novel was accepted by the first publisher to whom it was sent, who then had the singularly bad judgment to go bust before its release. From the resulting legal mire, Dear has salvaged her project and put the book out herself, under a publishing run so modest that, at this stage anyway, it's unlikely to have the critical mass to generate bestsellerdom.

Damn. Still, those who do read Ithaca will carry with them not just the story but the way it left them feeling. Lightly touched, but unexpectedly moved.

- © Fairfax NZ News