A LeafSalon reader, Jen Wittig, has sent in a review of Carl Nixon's Rocking Horse Road. As regular readers will know, we're always happy to have help here, so without further ado, it's over to Jen:

“At fifteen we did not know that there are before and after moments in every life; events people look back on as being gateways into new ways of living, new phases of their lives, sometimes better, but often not as good. It was a turning point for all of us living down the Spit. At that moment we moved through to a landscape from which, events would later prove, there was no going back.”

Rocking Horse Road (Random House, $27.99) is Carl Nixon’s first endeavour in the genre of the novel. Originally the piece was published as a short story, but Nixon felt there was more to be explored in the narrative and the characters, so expanded on it as his first full-length work of fiction.

The story tells of the death of a teenage girl named Lucy, found washed up on the beach in the days leading up to Christmas in the 1980s. This event deeply moves the small township and brings together a group of boys, one who is the narrator, and keeps them linked to one another for the rest of their lives. The group of boys, who are sometimes portrayed as individuals and other times simply as a group, collect any information note worthy to the killing of Lucy and file it as teenagers – and later as grown men.

I knew from the very beginning that there wasn’t going to be a resolution to this book, that this wasn’t a detective story or a tightly explained coming of age story where everything works out at the end, which made it all the harder to make this theme into a compelling story. What I felt was missing was the something more, the carrot so to speak, that would make me continue reading this book even though I knew from the beginning Lucy’s killer would not be revealed at the end.

Nixon’s story reminds me a lot of Jeffrey Eugenides’ The Virgin Suicides, though Eugenides does it better, and with a more darker, sinister and haunting feeling towards the end of his book. What irks me about this book is that you never get let into the lives of the boys, and in turn I feel little empathy towards them. If I as the reader don’t have anyone to connect with, it inevitably makes me read a book with less vigour. What I would have liked to have seen is one strong character (the narrator for example) being sucked dry by this obsession of this girl’s death, her death creeping into his every movement, his every interaction and making it a true obsession rather than just data collection by a group of boys. This would have highlighted the destruction and the shaping of one individual in terms of what happened when he was younger.

“One by one we broke free from the group and returned to our own homes. Daylight saving meant that it would not be dark for hours. Unusually, we were not hungry, but we knew our mothers would by then have dinner on the stove as they did every night. The uneasy feeling had followed us up from the beach. Now it dogged us, hard on our heels, slipping in behind us through the almost-closed doors of our homes. It trailed around after us all that evening. No matter what we did to distract ourselves we found it there after-wards, waiting patiently. The feeling was here to stay.”

Thanks for that Jen. Note that a play based on Carl Nixon's short story The Raft (from Fish n Chip Shop Song), a drama about the dynamics between four members of a family in an isolated crib on the West Coast, will open at the Court Theatre in Christchurch on July 28.