The Widow’s Daughter by Nicholas Edlin, Penguin, RRP $30, ISBN 9780143204091, Available now.
This review that has been haunting my brain for a few days now – well, ever since I finished The Widow’s Daughter. This should be a great book and I should have liked it – it has a great premise, it’s a debut novel, but the writing is technically good, it has a strong New Zealand connection… but nothing about it came together. And so much about it left me cold and wondering why I was reading it.
The Widow’s Daughter focuses on Peter Sokol – American marine and surgeon who arrives in Auckland in the early 1940s and becomes involved with a mysterious, self-proclaimed British family through a growing attraction/love/obsession for their daughter, Emily.
Much mystery then ensues, and the book switches between this setting and the Californian coast in the 70s, where Sokol lives with his partner and works as an artist - and the release of a new book written by a fellow Marine and essentially telling what Sokol believes is his story becomes the catalyst for revisiting within himself his time in New Zealand.
One of the downfalls is this switching between the two stories – particularly in the initial stages of the book, the chapters are quite short and there just isn’t enough time in each era to become comfortable and enthralled – or to take in what’s happening and become connected to events, locations and the characters. And it’s this sense of connection (which can really sort out the great books from the okay books) which then becomes a major problem later on.
I felt no connection to the characters in The Widow’s Daughter and little connection to the location or story. I found myself being less interested in the characters as the book went on – which is bottom about face, right? But the characters were cold, and unpleasant without charm. With this happening it then became difficult to connect to the location (despite a very obvious reason for why it should have been an easy connection – one of the reasons I wanted to read The Widow’s Daughter in the first place) and to the story – if I’m not caring about these characters I’m not caring about where they’re going, what will happen to them before they get there – and I had no emotional involvement in any possible redemption/epiphany of any of them.
The depiction of Auckland begins charmingly and truthfully with a focus on the nature of the light in New Zealand – sharp, hard, all-revealing and dazzling. I had a moment of “yes!” that got drowned out by the repetition of this insight – again and again and again and again and… again. Oh wait, metaphorical, right? *sigh* And any reader looking for an interesting sense of place from the setting of New Zealand, or any authentic sounding voice of the inhabitants, will finish very disappointed. Beyond the tidbit about Victoria Park being a rubbish tip/burner (again, repeated too many times) there is little detail about either the New Zealand/Auckland of the time or the Americans who found themselves there. One finished with the impression that the Kiwis at the time were all boofheads and the Americans were all drunks who spent all of their days with prostitutes. Really?
In the final equation I was simply frustrated and annoyed by The Widow’s Daughter. At heart it is not a badly written book but it all feels a bit like a show. In a twist the tagline on the cover – “When love becomes obsession” – ends up being quite apt – a meaningless phrase that doesn’t seem to have had a lot of time put into it or a critical eye cast over it.
