A lightly edited version of what Elizabeth Knox said at the recent launch of Damien Wilkins’ new novel Delirious. 

Damien’s novels, in all their variety, have always had a particular effect on me – a kind of gentle recalibration of my perspective and values. Damien entices us out of our depth and then out of our water-wings with a combination of rueful humour, an interest in people that may superficially look cool, but is I think more accurately described as patient. He’s the beneficent person confident enough of his understanding to sit in the folding chair at the picnic and watch his inventions dash around doing dangerous and daffy and questionable things – as if they’re his grandchildren rather than his children. He’s very fond of them, but not controlling fond. 

Damien isn’t just interested in people, he also has faith in them. This comes across so strongly in part because his books always let in grumpiness, acidity, even misanthropy, not just as the writer exercising his feelings, but as an attitude of, “People, you can do better!” with – and this is a miracle – the honest expectation that they will do better. These qualities have been present in all Damien’s books in different balances of wit, intelligence, compassion, cunning, a hard eye, and a kind of reconciliation between his great good taste and his own temperament as a writer willing to admit the satirical and the sentimental at the same time, because that’s how he meets life. 

All these qualities have intensified and shown themselves differently through each of his books from when he was a thrusting young writer to his current incarnation as a seasoned writer and teacher. When I think of Damien’s fiction I imagine the body of work not as an accumulation, but as something that was always there, and we finally have enough of it now so it’s not just a brightness slowly turning towards us but – lo and behold – a planet, and magnificent. 

I don’t want to say that Delirious is the pinnacle of what Damien can do because that would be like putting a curse on his future work. But I am going to say it’s almost impossible for me to imagine how he could do better. I think this is a great book – Great with capital G.

So, deliriously, about Delirious. It’s a novel that opens with a couple, Mary and Pete who, in their late 70s, are downsizing from their home on the Kāpiti Coast to a retirement community out of a sense of that’s what you do. They’re death cleaning, packing things away, finding what still fits with who they think they are, and what life they think they should be living. Which is the key to both the comedy and the consolations of this book when it comes to talking about old people. Mary and Pete have an idea about how old age is supposed to proceed – that, done properly, old age involves saving each other from the burden of future big decisions by choosing life in a retirement village, a future in which they have every reason to have expectations of a deserved happiness, if they can only convince themselves to embrace the culture of common sense, the commerce of “life stages”, and believe reports from the friends who’ve gone before them.

So, Mary and Pete are dutifully initiating the huge thing happening to them next, but this after a life of huge things, like huge drowning waves. A retirement village is a safe harbour for their dodgy hearing and dicky hearts. They’re struggling with the garden, and taking the neighbour’s dog for a walk – while also having social lives nibbled away as friends move or die. These incredible shrinking people are determined to get old age right. Or at least that’s the current marital project and neither wants to let the other one down. 

This isn’t an us and them book about generational differences. It argues that, if you’re lucky and you live, you’re going to get to the point where you’re responsible for a sibling in trouble, ageing parents, dying parents, and then if you’re lucky and you live even longer you get to be on the other side of it and become the problem and the repository of stress and love and pity. You take your turn then have your turn. Old old story. The general run of things. Except Delirious isn’t a novel about old age and its perspectives, but one that vividly imagines the nearest to possible wholeness of nearly whole long lives. It runs on its protagonists’ brimming store of lived life. But, if this novel was going to have a tag line it might be “The past comes back changed”. 

It isn’t a story that moves towards the revelation of a calamity in the past. In fact we learn very early on that Mary and Pete had a son, Will, who died when he was 11. We know there’s been a calamity and we know these people have survived it and that the story is how. We’re invited to do the work of imagining how Pete and Mary felt as younger people when they lost their son before we see them as younger people losing their son. And that means we’re primed for what happens next. 

During the retirement home decisions and death cleaning an old police colleague of Mary’s turns up with the news that the person responsible for Will’s death is terminal and wants to speak to them. This request really gets them thinking. Not so much brooding or ruminating but breaking open. The novel beyond this scene breaks open too, as beautifully organised and beautiful as a lotus blossom. We’re shown a couple surviving the death of their only child, alone and together, and the rest of their story – funny trenchant stuff about what it was like to be a woman police officer in the early 80s, troubles, like Mary’s sister, Claire, dying prematurely and Mary walking with her through her illness. And after Claire’s death, Pete and Mary trying with the ordinary ham-fistedness of people who have to deal with a grieving teen to figure out what they can do for Claire’s son, Colin. 

And then there’s Pete’s mother – probably the person who best understood Will – who gets the kind of dementia that sends its sufferer into a delirium of disinhibition and confabulation, which is to say she develops a whole surreal take on herself, her life and her family, made up of things her civil self, the good wife mother and grandmother, hasn’t quite been able to process, like history’s worst atrocities. The scenes of Pete with his demented mother are mind-bending and capture both the horror and wild liveliness of a wandering mind. 

Delirious goes backwards and forwards in time to show how our pasts change as our understanding changes. It does this with such honesty and deftness that I was in awe of it. I said in my blurb that there were times that it was so acutely moving – or maybe just truthful about grief – that, as I read, I was beating my breast as if trying to restart my own heart. And as well as being sad and beautiful and compassionate this novel is also a tonic. It isn’t a book about loss that offers us tools to deal with grief, it just delivers its message from the far side of experiences’ extinguishing of self. Mary and Pete went through those things yet here they are, walking a dog, spreading mulch, hiding from happy hour. 

It’s a book about how to live through loss, and with loss, and because of loss. A book that put me in the position of Pete’s mother when she’s mixing up other people’s experiences with her own, confusing what she’s lived with what she’s learned, which is I think what we do emotionally we read a book like this that wants us to beat our breasts, a book that isn’t polite, and doesn’t ask permission, and works by surprise and entrapment, and belief in the good of what it knows. 

Delirious is my favourite New Zealand novel. Damien, I salute you and thank you for it.

Delirious by Damien Wilkins ($38, Te Herenga Waka University Press) is available to purchase from Unity Books.